Greetings neighbors,
A homeschooling family doing American History might very well travel across the country to come to homeschool days at Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown, and they'll budget themselves several days to a week or more to be in Virginia for their visit. http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.com/plan/groups/homeschoolers/
So there they are, in Virginia studying colonial history together. What a fabulous time to offer a special one-day homeschool shoot at a nearby range. With proper planning, an event in conjunction with Williamsburg homeschool days could be a big hit. If we're trying to attract travelers rather than locals as our shooters, of course, we'd need tons of loaners and ammo, so it presents a particular logistical challenge. But that seems like a challenge to overcome rather than a reason not to proceed.
The Williamsburg website does not yet have their dates up for the spring or fall 2015 homeschool days. So we don't have a specific time to shoot for yet. But it looks like fall events tend to be mid-September, and spring events are in February.
What if we aim to hold a one-day shoot near Williamsburg next September? Here's what we need to know: can we nail down a range (Lafayette Gun Club seems closest)? Can we find sufficient instructors? Can we get a sufficient number of loaners? Since I'm down in NC I don't have connections to any ranges up there, and probably shouldn't try to take the lead on that side of things, but I'm happy to work on putting together ammo, as well as getting on the marketing once we get something specific put together.
With more than a year's lead time, I would like to think that we can make this work. It would be pretty awesome for Appleseed to become part of a destination week for homeschool travelers. They can do our earliest history at Jamestown and Williamsburg, get a dose of 1775 at Appleseed, and then head to Yorktown to hear about how the big surrender. Please let me know if you're interested in working on this.
A week to visit the Rev war and PreRev sites is just enough. If you want to add the Civil war sites a week is not enough. You can easily spend 2 days at Williamsburg, and 1 at Jamestown and 1 at Yorktown. If you want a day at VA Beach or one of the 3 amusement parks in the area you are at 5 days.
Alternately it would be very easy to spend 2 days at Williamsburg, 1 on Yorktown and Jamestown, 1/2 at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, 1/2 a day at Cold Harbor, 1/2 a day at Petersburg battlefield and a 1/2 day at Pamplin Park and the Museum of the Civil War Soldier just South of Petersburg. Then there are the plantations that date back to the Pre-Revolution at Shirley and Berkley, as well as a number of distributed Earthworks from the Penninsula campaign of 1862.
The problem with this is finding the range in that area. Virginians have tried to work with ranges down there for the last 7 years. The closest that we came was C2 in Pungo (VA Beach on the border with North Carolina). Of the other ranges, one focuses on 4h as it's training arm and the other is pretty difficult for position shooting (it is set up for bench shooting and they require platforms on the benches to allow high power there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Campaign
http://www.nps.gov/pete/index.htm
http://www.nps.gov/pete/index.htm
http://www.nps.gov/rich/historyculture/cold-harbor.htm
http://www.pamplinpark.org/
Libertyseed?
So much of that educational tourism consists of walking, watching and listening. It would be great to give them some hands-on activity. I'm about to move to three hours away from Wmsburg, but will help out in any way possible.
Sure a liberty seed could work, but it would probably be better at the homeschoolers conventions.
I'm new to the forum. My family and I would be willing to help any way we can. We live in Ohio about 3hr or so from Williamsburg.
Bas
Bas, i may be missing something, but it seems to me that from Ohio to Williamsburg, Virginia is three hours only by jet.