{TAKE ME TO} Historic Downtown Petersburg

Last weekend, Bjorn and I ventured oh, maybe three minutes away from Fort Lee to the town of Petersburg! Virginia has a huge number of battlefields and historical sites to visit, and we’ve spent many other days exploring towns further away from base. So Petersburg is kind of a hidden gem, I suppose, considering we’d been in Virginia all summer and didn’t truly explore the town until my last weekend there!

(Also, when I say Petersburg is a “hidden gem,” I mean that hypothetically, I may have ended up there earlier this summer. If you’re driving around by yourself on the way home from a dress tailor and hypothetically get lost and the van starts overheating, Petersburg could hypothetically be a great place to stop to regroup, and wander into the Historic Petersburg Visitor Center where nice older ladies stuff your hands with historic sites brochures and point you in the right direction…as long as you promise to show the brochures to your [history teacher] husband. These sorts of things hypothetically happen a lot to…someone I know. 🙂 Anyway.)

We didn’t actually plan to spend the day in Petersburg. It all started because I heard of a cute little tea room in town that offered a full afternoon tea. Yep. That means tea, scones with Devonshire cream, tower of sandwiches and cakes and fruit skewers…the whole shebang. And might I interject here that I have the most sweet, thoughtful, self-sacrificial husband? I wanted to have a tea party. And despite countless other things my husband might have wanted to do on a Saturday, he said…sure. 🙂

The Blue Willow Tea Room is SUCH a cute place! It’s attached to an antique shop and there are even antique pieces for sale within the tea room itself. I did read a few online reviews before we went here, and I have to say, all the reviews were very high…and I agree! It was such a fun experience.

My sister took me to high tea in Chicago last summer, which was so fancy and wonderful! This place wasn’t quite as fancy as our tea time at the Drake, but it brought back fun memories and had its own special atmosphere. 🙂

^^ scones with Devonshire cream ^^

^^ The famed tower of teatime snacks! (Why can’t we serve all meals like this? It really raises the epic factor!) ^^

^^ and yes, we selected the “Downton Abbey Breakfast Tea” blend! ^^

^^ tomato basil soup ^^

^^ so many happy little sandwiches ^^

All right, moving on from that wonderful tea party (although, if you’re anything like me, you kind of want to just sit in perpetual tea party mode all day…)

We continued our Petersburg meanderings out in the hot Virginia (read: humid) sun, getting thirstier by the minute. At one point we stopped at a local bar where I washed down an obscene amount of ice-cold sweet tea! There were antique shops on every street we turned down! We ducked into one dusty-smelling store after another, and had a blast sifting through all of the items. I did pretty well (cue pat on the back) not grabbing everything in sight that I thought was “cute!” 🙂 We did have a discussion about one particular quilt rack, but the longer I tried to persuade Bjorn we needed it, the less rose-colored my rose-colored glasses became. And then I realized it wasn’t that great after all. It really was quite…well, worn-out. Whew. Saved us some money there! The perks of having a practical husband are boundless. 🙂

^^ and we just HAD to stop for an obligatory picture of the trees I fell so deeply in love with this summer… 🙂 ^^

^^ We topped off our afternoon with a museum tour of a beautiful historic mansion in town. The museum enticed us with its a/c…I mean, history. 🙂 In truth, though, we loved every second of the tour! ^^

Thanks for following along with our Virginia adventures on Just Bee!! It is so fun to re-live these excursions by sharing them with you! And hopefully these posts have offered you some fun travel ideas, too. 🙂

[ Psst: For a whole swath of other {TAKE ME TO} posts from our travel series, just click the tab at the top of this page! ]