One thing we really enjoyed about Virginia Beach was seeing all the F/A-18s flying around. The sound of freedom! I miss living near an operational base. One day I struck up a conversation with a mom at the little beach playground. Her son, who was about 4, was identifying all the airplanes as Superhornets. I asked if her husband was in the Navy, and she said yes, that he was a pilot in fact. I asked if he flew hornets. She very firmly corrected me by saying, "Yes, he flies SUPERhornets." So I just want to warn all of you--if you ask Bob what he does, he will find a way to work in that he flies SUPERsatellites. And I am a mom of SUPERkids, LOL. I guess that's a big deal in Navy circles? She also added that her husband loves what he does. When I came back over to our little area and reported this all to the boys, their general reaction was, "Yeah . . duh! That would be SO cool!"Just to increase the general knowledge of my reading base, the ordinary, plain-jane Hornet is the F/A-18 A-D models. The Blue Angels still fly this regular boring old model. The SUPERhornet is the F/A-18 E-F models. The are larger, have more armaments, and a greater fuel capacity. In fact, it can be configued for use as an aerial tanker by adding an external air refueling system. So now you know.
Wednesday afternoon after lunch, everyone was pretty much done with the beach. Faith was in desperate need of a nap, but our room was in desperate need of vacuuming, since it hadn't been cleaned yet, and it was FULL of sand. I proposed we drive over to Norfolk Naval Station to gawk at all the big ships. Hopefully Faith would nap in the car. She did indeed fall asleep as soon as we drove away from the hotel. We found our way over there using an old-fashioned technology called a "road atlas". This is because we somehow have lost our GPS system--well, we have the cord that plugs into the cig. lighter, but not the actual screen part. It used to be in Bob's van, the one that doesn't any longer have a working transmission. I'm sure we brought it inside and put it in a very safe place, where it is still residing to this day. Unfortunately, we have no idea where that safe place may be. Anyhow, we had to use maps for this trip. When we got to the base, we found the piers and started driving around. I mentioned all the money we were saving, because you (if you are not military) can take a tour of the base on a comfy bus for $10 a person. Bob pointed out that we were pretty much getting what we paid for, since the only ships we recognized were the aircraft carriers, LOL. We saw the USS Enterprise, the USS Harry S Truman, and the newest one, the USS George H.W. Bush. Cool! We also saw a lot of other cool gray ships that made us wish we had gotten a bunch of books out of the library so we could identify them. Or that we had paid $10 for one of us to go on the tour so he or she could come back with great knowledge and report to the rest of us. We also recognised some tugboats. They are so cute!
We also played several rounds of our banana car game during the course of our trip. We were amazed to find over 40 bananas on Norfolk Naval Station! Do sailors have some sort of thing for bright yellow cars?! What does it mean?! It is indeed a mystery.
As we were getting ready to drive back to the hotel, we went through the base McDonalds drive-through. We ordered 3 large fries for a snack for us all to share, and 8 cups of ice water. The lady was confused about whether we wanted BOTTLES of water, which of course we did not. Finally she understood that we wanted 8 courtersy cups of ice water. When we pulled around to pay, the total was over $15! She told us she had to charge us $1 per cup--because there were so many of them! What in the world?! So we told her to cancel the whole order and we drove away. Good grief! Because water and those cheap cups are sooo expensive. So if you are a large family, we don't recommend the Norfolk McDonalds--they ration their water!
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