1st Anniversary Trip – Day 3

We got up and moving, had another delicious breakfast, and headed out to the National Museum of the Pacific War to nose around and check out the Pacific combat reenactment. When I first started going to Fredericksburg, the only museum was the Nimitz Museum, located here because this was Adm. Nimitz’s home town. Over time that has morphed into a world class museum covering the Pacific theater of World War II. The museum is so large that you really do need two days to get through it and the tickets are good for two days’ admission. We snagged our tickets and then made our way down the street to the theater where they do the combat reenactments. The show was fun, with lots of functional (blank firing) vintage firearms, both from the Americans as well as the Japanese. The reenactors were mostly younger kids, in their late teens and early 20s, but there were some older folks there as well. After the show was over, we went back to the museum and went through as much as we could.

From there, we did some walking around and shopping, finding some neat stuff, including some liquid filled chocolates from Chocolat and some wines from the Fredericksburg Winery.

For dinner, we decided to head over to one of the local German places, but were defeated by a combination of timing and hostess apathy. We pulled in to the Auslander, saw many open tables, but were told there was an hour wait to get seated. So we bailed on that and decided to check out a different place. After wandering a little, we settled on Hondo’s on Main, a small dive close to our cottage. We weren’t disappointed, not a bit. This is a no frills place, don’t go in here expecting table service. You order your drinks and food at the bar and pick up your food at the kitchen window. But the food is excellent and the drinks are well priced. I got the ribs, made a mess eating them, but loved every minute of it. We even saw our hosts eating at another table, so it’s obviously good enough for the locals too. That capped off our evening, so we headed back to the cottage to finish packing up and get ready to head home in the morning.