. Southern Chesapeake Bay (Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton) - May 2006
After leaving the peace and quite of the Dismal Swamp canal, we came out into the Elizabeth River and the entrance to Norfolk harbor - one of the busiest harbors on the east coast. It's not only a huge Navy town, but a very busy industrial port with lots of ships, tugs with barges and boats of all sizes coming and going in all directions. Not to mention the bridges. We were waiting for this bridge to open, when we saw a big barge coming up from behind. We scooted over and let the big guy go past since it was pretty windy and he let us know that he didn't have a whole lot of control.
Welcome to Norfolk!!
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We stayed in Portsmouth, which is across the Elizabeth River from Norfolk. We took the Portsmouth-Norfolk ferry across to visit Norfolk the next day. The ferry is supposed to look like a little paddle-wheel boat. Cute, but the paddle wheel doesn't really touch the water!
The symbol of the Norfolk/Portsmouth area is the mermaid. There were mermaids everywhere - kind of like the painted cow exhibit in Chicago or the painted lobster exhibit in Rockland Maine - or even (on a much smaller scale) - the painted dragon egg exhibit in Oriental.
My favorite was a painting on the floor inside the Harbourside Shopping area..
Norfolk, as I mentioned, is a BIG Navy town. We saw this neat statue in the park called 'Homecoming'.
I imagine that was the scene played many times over in this town. We visited the USS Wisconsin - an Iowa-class warship docked at the city front in Norfolk. Jeremy even tried out one of the bed racks they had at the nearby museum. Good thing he wasn't in the Navy - doesn't look like such a comfortable fit. The sailor's get about 16 square feet of space under each bunk to store their personal stuff. Apparently, this is a big improvement over what they had on the Wisconsin where they had footlockers for their stuff and slept in canvas bunks.
While we were up on the USS Wisconsin, we noticed some other traffic out on the water - a barge with a big crane on board came cruising past - and we also saw this fireboat out with hoses going full blast. Was that meant as a welcome for us??? As Elvis would say 'Thank you, thank you very much!!'
Beautiful church tower in the Portsmouth Old Town area and the sunset at the Portsmouth marina.
We headed out of Portsmouth after a couple of days and did the short run up to Hampton. Hampton has a big Air and Space museum complete with an IMAX theatre. The town dock at Hampton charges for dockage, but they do give you a Hampton Day pass which is good for lots of discounts in town including free admission to this museum (including the IMAX). We went to see The Poseidon Adventure movie - not a great movie - but it was pretty neat to see it on the IMAX screen. Plus, the price was right!
The museum had lots of hand's on exhibits - which was especially fun for the big kid in our party. Jeremy got to climb into a jet cockpit, learn how to land a jet on an aircraft carrier and also play with some pretty cool flight simulators.
Associated with the museum is a beautiful old wooden carousel. I guess there was something for ALL the big kids..
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Saw this painted on the side of an brick building in town. Maybe they got tired of folks asking where the front door is???
Updated May 22, 2006