To Plan A Trip

The number for the Virginia Tourism Office is 1-800-248-4833. To reach Colonial Williamsburg, you dial 1-800-HISTORY, and you should do it early as possible because it is busy in the fall. Sol Stember’s splendid The Bicentennial Guide to the American Revolution is out of print but invaluable on this and every other Revolutionary battlefield. Just outside town the Yorktown Victory Center tells the story of the war in imaginative displays and has a year-round encampment laid out according to Baron von Steuben’s regulations. Tim Mulligan’s Virginia: A History & Guide (Random House) is a relaxed, lively, and helpful survey of Yorktown and Williamsburg and, for that matter, the rest of the Old Dominion.