100% All-Natural Content
No Artificial Intelligence!

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Pictures from our Hampton/Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Newport News excursion

Lisa took a lot more pictures with her film camera that I'll probably be adding on to these eventually, but here's a look at some of the stuff we did this past week after arriving in Hampton, Virginia:

U.S. Navy aircraft carriers docked at Norfolk


Another Navy ship berthed in Norfolk (we caught this pic on our way back home.)

Tuesday I got to do something that I've been wanting to do for years: drive the length of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. We paid $12 at the southern entrance in Virginia Beach and entered the 19-mile long (17 miles of it over and under the water) causeway:
On the bridge-tunnel's south artifial island we stopped at the gift shop and I got to take a very special picture of Lisa: I've been on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel twice before, in 1984 and 1992, and both times I had my picture taken at the northern-most point you can get on the island. Well, a few days ago I took this photo of Lisa at the exact same spot:
Here's the reason why the Chesapeake Bay Bridge has two tunnels: so that boat traffic (like Navy ships such as this one out of Norfolk) can glide across the bay and into the open waters of the Atlantic unimpeded:
Driving through the first Chesapeake tunnel:
We drove a few miles on Virginia's eastern shore and then turned back around for the return trip to the mainland (since we were returning within a 24 hour period from our initial crossing it only cost us $5 for the return drive).

Here's Lisa later that night, on the "boardwalk" of a beach in Hampton:

The next day we visited Yorktown, where British forces under General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington, thus ending major fighting in the Revolutionary War. Here I am standing with the victory monument in the background:

And also at Yorktown, here is the "Poor Potter's" kiln and earthworks... which actually turns out to have been the first major pottery operation of its kind in colonial America (linked image is larger so you can see the detail of the archeological work done at the site):

The next day (Thursday) we visited the Virginia Air and Space Museum (which also has an IMAX screen showing Superman Returns in 3D, but we didn't watch that again). Here's me standing in front of the command module from the Apollo 12 lunar mission:

After we finished there we returned to our hotel for awhile, then went to the mall nearby where I bought the latest Mad Magazine, and then came back and rested a bit before heading out to eat dinner and seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at a theater in Newport News.

And, that's basically our trip in a nutshell. We had such a great time that we're planning on going back in the fall when its cooler, and then take in such sites as Colonial Williamsburg and the Jamestown settlement.

Look for pics from Lisa either here or on her own blog soon :-)

0 comments: