Virginia is for (Beach) Lovers

Well, our precious vacation time is up but it was well spent! We started off Brent's two week break at Virginia Beach with his parents and two of his little sibs, Jane and Garrett. We stayed right on the beach and played in the waves all morning and saw the sights in the afternoon.

The spectacular view from our hotel room! Our first morning there we saw dolphins swimming along the beach from our patio...too bad I wasn't out there with my underwater camera.



I love this picture because Brent thinks I locked him outside but the evidence clearly proves otherwise...ahahaha.



The waves were pretty small, so we had to come up with some challenges including riding waves backwards, upside down, sideways, two people on one board....most of which are undocumented, though I think Baird might have some evidence on his camera...





I'm not sure what was going on but we saw a lot of these:



and these, while laying on the beach, something flew overhead at least every thirty minutes and the jets were soooo loud.



We got a tip from some friends that the VB aquarium was a must-see so we checked it out and ended up seeing the IMAX Under the Sea 3D show, which was a total sensory overload but worth it just to see everyone in their 3D glasses.



Also, I felt claustrophobic for this hatchling which was about three inches long and stuck in a one foot long tank. But I suppose he can't really complain since in real life he would most likely have been eaten by a seagull approximately 15 seconds after birth.



I want to take this opportunity to give tripadvisor a shout out, it told us that the USS Wisconsin was the #2 attraction in Norfolk, VA. Norfolk is just a few minutes away from Virginia Beach and even though it was a sweltering day I thought the ship and the museum were really interesting, especially the models of old ships and submarines. The Wisconsin has fought in wars from WWII to Korea to Desert Storm and is being maintained in Norfolk incase she is ever called on in the furture.
This old volunteer guy on the ship told us that the USS Wisconsin had a crew of almost 3,000 at one time and only about 1,800 beds. I asked him how that could possibly work and he said "Oh, there was probably some 'hot-bunking' going on"....I wasn't quite sure what that meant so he further explained that the sailors slept in shifts and had to share bunks. I thought that sounded somewhat unsanitary.





The day we visited the USS Wisconsin also happened to be our 2nd anniversary so we had to get at least one picture together:



And at dinner (another tripadvisor recommendation) we recreated our wedding carrot cake with this delightful rendition...mmmm....it was almost as good as the original, as you can see.



One more note about virginia beach, though we did enjoy the beach, the street that runs parallel to the beach right behind the hotels is a somewhat questionable area for young, impressionable minds (such as Garrett's ;) This shop is one of at least a dozen advertising tattoos and piercings, and some shops even do the piercings right in the window front. We stopped for a minute to watch and the tattooist was motioning to us to come get our own! Haha. As one tripadvisor commenter put it "Virginia Beach's Atlantic Avenue strip is packed with cheap stores selling extraordinarily vulgar merchandise, which draws a like-minded crowd." Couldn't have said it better myself. I had to shield Brent's eyes from some of the t-shirts in the store windows. Ewww.



However, they did have some signs encouraging people not to use profanities, which I appreciated.