We’d just popped off of Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park near Luray, Virginia and were looking for a local restaurant for a late lunch when we passed a group of cabins tucked next to the road under some pretty trees, and a stone building next to them that said “Restaurant.”

Can you say u-turn, with a spray of gravel?

It turned out to be the Brookside Restaurant, a well-known eatery in these parts and perfect for our lunch.

The cuisine was down-home and there were many sandwich and salad options, with homemade veggie sides (I liked the green beans.) Those sticks of sweet potato came with a sweet honey-butter dipping sauce that contrasted divinely with the saltiness of the fries.

There’s a food and salad buffet as well, a kid’s menu with the usual chicken tenders suspects and a dessert menu full of pies and fruit cobblers.

I laughed at the beer listings at the bottom of the menu, which included three brews labeled “Imported and Yuppie Beer.” Since Sam Adams is based in Boston and Killians is made by Coors, they must be the Yuppie ones.

Don’t miss the pretty running stream (hence the name “brookside”) just behind the restaurant.

First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia ate here recently during a family trip to nearby Luray Caverns.

I wonder if they ordered the fries?

At the Yorktown Victory Center in Virginia, there are all sorts of kid-friendly demonstrations like this one on Colonial-era doctoring, and as a bonus, this coming weekend is a special two-day Yorktown Victory Weekend to commemorate the American Revolution’s Battle of Yorktown.

There will be encampments with reenactors, demonstrations and interpretive tours – you can take one of my favorite fall scenic drives, the Colonial Parkway, to get there.

Just keep that scalpel and those tooth-pullers away from me, okay?

Don’t you want to jump right into it?

Anyone can eat at the taverns in the historic area (you don’t have to buy the admissions pass to the other exhibits, buildings and performances, although I’d certainly recommend that if you have time.)

Try Christiana Campbell’s, Chowning’s and Shields in addition to King’s Arms;  they all have children’s menus (and pssst….Tarpley’s store nearby has old-fashioned candies if you don’t want a tavern dessert.)

If you want to stay in Colonial Williamsburg and truly immerse your kids in Revolutionary history, always check on the Web site for special packages that usually include hotel, breakfast and passes for everyone.

For example, I love the interactive street theater of the Revolutionary City mini-plays that reenactors stage all over the historic area, all day. Your family can participate in them with the Revolutionary City Adventure package.

Mostly, just make an excuse to get ahold of some of that pot pie.

(This post is my contribution to this week’s WanderFood Wednesday on the Wanderlust and Lipstick blog.)

We’re going in alphabetical order but started with the end, so our first state for the series was Wyoming, then we investigated Wisconsin , West Virginia , Washington and now we’re moving on to….Virginia!

These guys are HOPPIN’ online  –  you can find their state tourism organization on Twitter at @VisitVirginia plus @VATourismPR, and here is the Virginia travel and tourism Facebook page.

Their state parks folks are on Twitter at @VAStateParks. There is also a Virginia tourism YouTube channel, the Virginia Flickr pool and a whole site for Virginia Green Travel.

When I asked for ideas, here’s what came in….

Twitter Travel Tips for Virginia

From Dwight Silverman via @dsilverman on Twitter  –  [Virginia Beach's] Capt. George’s Seafood Buffet is good for kids. Huge amounts of good food; my sister calls it “Capt. Gorge”. She lives in VA Beach.

From Nancy Schretter via @KidTravel on Twitter  — Virginia’s my home state. Two of my favorite VA parks for families are Lake Anna and Smith Mountain Lake. They’re fabulous!

From Jenna Schnuer via @JennaSchnuer on Twitter  — Here’s one of my favorites – and definitely a great family travel spot. Link is to my WorldHum piece about [the Clinch Mountain's Carter Family Fold dance hall, with old-time country and bluegrass music]  The Most Joyous Place in the World.

From @jayne52 on Twitter  — My favorite place: Arlington National Cemetery, so moving, & historical Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Kennedy gravesite esp. at holidays.

From Char Polanosky via @charpolanosky on Twitter  — Williamsburg, Busch Gardens, Great Wolf Lodge, Water Country USA make for a great family vacation in VA.

From @TheLocalAccent on Twitter  — Please visit our website for great travel ideas in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula of Virginia: TheLocalAccent.com

From Ronnie Crocker via @rcrocker on Twitter  — Colonial Williamsburg always has lots of neat stuff, but Busch Gardens is probably most kids’ fave. Not sure about new attractions [see MechTeach below, about Sesame St.]

From @MechTeach on Twitter  –  Williamsburg is #1: Colonial W’burg, Busch Gardens (has new Sesame Street Land) Water Country USA, Yorktown, lots o’ pancake restaurants.

(Speaking of pancakes, but in Virginia Beach….) From Carla Young via @redyelllow on Twitter  — For breakfast close to the beach Pocahontas Pancake and Waffle Shop. She also gives us a “beach tip: don’t forget sunblock, especially behind the knees, even if it looks like there is no sun.”

Facebook Travel Tips for Virginia

From John Bredehoft on Facebook  –  I heartily recommend Williamsburg. The historic district keeps cars outside of the perimeter and provides a living view of our country before it was a country.

I got one tip that came in from the LinkedIn professional networking site: From Debi on LinkedIn (she blogs at By-Lander-Sea Food Tales)  –  Has to be Colonial Williamsburg. I have the fondest memories of going there as a child as well as taking my children. Very authentic. Stay in true colonial homes if you can; check them out.

Of course, I have the Great Stuff for Kids: Virginia and Great Stuff for Kids: Washington, DC categories here on Family Travel Logue, and on the BootsnAll Travel Network you’ll find the Virginia Travel Guide.

(Update:  the state is running a 40 Off Travel promotion – $40 off, 40 % off, spend three nights & get a fourth night free, or buy three, get a fourth free. Discounts apply to attractions, lodging, etc. all over the state – see 40 Off Travel Deals for more details.)

Thanks so much for the contributions – the next state in the series is Vermont.

Send your Vermont highlights to @SheilaS on Twitter or my Facebook page (tell me you’re a 50 state-er if you want to friend me.)

Yes, I know how to search for family travel ideas on a destination or attraction Web site, but a tweet or Facebook recommendation is a much more engaging and public way to spread the word.

My purpose for this series is not only to highlight worthy kid-friendly vacation destinations in all 50 states, but by using Twitter and Facebook I want to also encourage tourism organizations to learn more about connecting with their visitors using social media and online networks.

Please add your own Virginia suggestions in the comments below, if we’ve missed anything. Thanks!

An interactive history, science and technology center, it features hundred of exhibits, including deep ocean exploration, US Navy history and NOAA’s “Science on a Sphere” weather display.

There is also a shark petting lagoon and a 2000-gallon touch tank (with a new horseshoe crab family!) that is quite a hit with young kids.

A zippy AEGIS Command Center lets visitors see a narrated, simulated engagement using much of the display equipment that is currently installed aboard Navy AEGIS destroyers and cruisers.

The 887-foot-long battleship Wisconsin is permanently docked adjacent to the main Nauticus museum building, and you can climb around on a lot of it, both topside and below decks.

There are often special events and exhibits, and on January 21, 2009 there’s a day of educational programming just for homeschoolers.

The city of Norfolk (adjacent to Virginia Beach – the whole region is called Hampton Roads) has a promotional right now called “Half-Off.”  Family travelers can get 50% off of admission to many popular city attractions (including Nauticus) and some restaurant discounts by booking one night at participating hotels, until January 31, 2009.

I’ll bet you anything that given the current economic client, they’ll either extend that offer or come up with a similar one, so contact the Norfolk CVB at (757) 664-6620 or click here for info on tourist special offers and packages.

Remember that this is a heavily military area, with lots of bases and Department of Defense facilities, so military families may have options available in temporary lodging. For more details, I like the military recreation facility books by retirees Ann and Roy Crawford: Military Living.

Update: I forgot to include a link to this excellent article by Budget Travel on other things to do and see in Norfolk VA.

These dolls were in a box in an outdoor, tented market stall on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia.  Vendors in Colonial dress were selling all sorts of related gizmos – penny whistles, tri-cornered hats, butter churns (OK, just kidding on that last one.)

I have photographic evidence of my teen daughter wearing a replica of a late 1700s women’s cap, also for sale at the stall, but I can only push the Blogging Mom thing so far!

Check the Colonial Williamsburg Monthly Specials page for deals on lodging and admission, and the Calendar page for upcoming events and focused tours for children, like a chance to be a pretend trade apprentice (like a weaver or silversmith.)

Related posts:

• Video of the Week: Colonial Williamsburg
• It’s Home Educator Week in Colonial Williamsburg
• Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, Virginia

As noted in the Miami Herald, hotels with indoor water parks are becoming very popular, and for good reason. They allow families, including weak swimmers and non-swimmers, to enjoy watery fun year-round.

I’ve taken the kids to Juliplatz indoor water park in Japan and Mosaqua in the Netherlands, but nothing on the scale of the properties in the article.

I can, however, vouch for the Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, Virginia. We stayed there in a very nice, big room for one night last summer, and I learned something.

A giant facility like that with hundreds of hyper kids is not normally my idea of fun, but as I wrote over at the Perceptive Travel blog, sometimes the traveling parent faces a hotel reality check:

“The enormous indoor water park section of the hotel was spectacular, I must say, and much easier to enjoy than tromping around a spread-out, hot, open-air water park. Still….I guess I just don’t tend to look for indoor water parks in my hotels. The kids, naturally, were in heaven. I don’t think I physically saw my son for about two hours in the water park, as he went from ride to ride and up and down slides. Sitting in the park, surrounded by screaming, laughing wet children and adults and 300,000 gallons of water, I had time to reflect about getting over myself. Maybe I need to build a few more of these kid-focused places into our trips, even if they aren’t my cup of tea.”

There’s more to Great Wolf than the water park, and you’ll see it as soon as you walk into the soaring lobby, decorated in Great North Woods rustic style with lots of animals and a big fireplace.

Just in case your kids don’t get enough video games, there is the Northern Lights Arcade, a whole blacklighted room with more than 100 games. I saw families going all over the resort playing Magiquest, a live action adventure game/treasure hunt with special Harry Potter-like wands.

In milder weather, there are outdoor pools with cabanas, a rock climbing wall and the Howl in One 18 hole putt-putt golf course. The Elements Spa/Salon pampers adults, and a variety of in-house restaurants cover meal requirements.

Rooms are not cheap; they start at around $200/night, but considering that they include waterpark admission and other amusements, that may work for your budget, especially if you take advantage of in-room kitchenettes to prepare meals.

Look for seasonal specials, particularly right now in wintertime.

The CVS disposable costs about US$30 and then another US$12-13 to develop, but it did motivate me to film without my usual over-analyzing and artistic angst. Once I show you the good clips from it, I’m going to start using the video mode on my Kodak digital camera, for better video quality.

I’ve never had a video camera, so I made all of the usual newbie mistakes: panning/moving the camera too fast so that the resulting video induces vomiting, simply forgetting that I had the thing in my purse, and then not getting around to getting the clips off of the camera and onto my computer.

With great fanfare, I’d like to announce that in addition to filming a little video clip of me with a laptop camera, I actually drove over to my local CVS pharmacy yesterday and got the contents of the camera onto a DVD. I popped the DVD into my laptop and voila — a whole lot of “OMG, I forgot I filmed that!”

So, here is my first attempt at doing a little travel video work for Family Travel’s Photo/Video of the Week — it’s a short narrated clip from July 2007, taken on Duke of Gloucester Street in front of the King’s Arms Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg.

(1/12/08 – The original video seems to have somehow disappeared, so here is a link to it on YouTube in case it drops out again….)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uAza9uCLKM

I thought you’d enjoy Lydia’s fun report (complete with her son in a tri-cornered hat) on her Little Blue School blog: Colonial Williamsburg in Inappropriate Shoes.

The next special educational event is African-American history programs throughout February 2008, and the next Home Educator Week is February 20 — March 5, 2008.

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, homeschooling, Colonial Williamsburg

For those of my readers who homeschool, next week (September 17-21, 2007) is the designated “Home Educator Week” on site at Colonial Williamsburg, the 1700s living history museum in Virginia that my own family visited earlier this summer.

The Home Educator Week information sheet lists all sorts of places that you can visit and the role that they played in America’s Colonial daily life.

There are tradespeople like weavers and the wheelwrights (who kept carriages and wagons on the move) that you and the kids can watch in action, and the info sheet tells you who’s doing what and on which day.

For example:

“If you make your way back to Duke of Gloucester street you will find the Blacksmith ready to meet your needs Monday through Sunday from 9-5.  Directly across the street, visit the Print Shop in the mornings from 9-1, and the [book] Bindery in the afternoon from 1-5.”

There are also special learning programs this week at the Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. For example:

September 19

** 10:30am – Wee Folk – meet in the museum’s Introductory Gallery. This program is geared to children ages 3-7 and their adult friends. Participants explore the galleries through stories and activities. 45 minutes.

** 3:00pm – Crack the Code – meet in the museums’ Education Gallery. See if you can Crack the Code as we investigate various Secret Codes used during the [American] Revolution. One hour. Geared for ages 8 and older.

If you are there during this event, don’t miss musician Dean Shostak and his glass armonica (invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761.)  He’ll play it and other instruments in concert on Wednesday, September 19th at 11:30am and 1:30pm at Williamsburg’s Kimball Theater.

If you can’t make it to Virginia, there are electronic field trips and other teaching resources available, including a teacher’s e-newsletter.

Related post:

• Colonial Williamsburg: A Home Educator’s Report

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, homeschooling, Colonial Williamsburg