Virginia Beach

May 22, 2023

Sorry it’s taking a long time to post. Turns out moving from hotel to hotel, while trying to enjoy each destination, while working, is quite time consuming and exhausting.

This post covers our week in Virginia Beach, of course mostly photos.

The first thing we noticed, and continued to notice, was the fighter jets flying over the area, from 8am to midnight sometimes, with maybe a half hour break at some points. Every. Day. They are loud, they fly low, to the point where everyone has to stop conversations and wait from them to pass. Sometimes they circle so it takes a long time to leave. We have taken Virginia Beach off our “going to return” list simply because of this.

The hotel we stayed at was retro!

Across the street was the beach. Near where we were was a massive statue of Neptune. There’s a whole thing around Neptune and Virginia Beach. Here are photos.

We visited the Cape Henry Lighthouse. Here’s what their website says about it (saves me time!)

Cape Henry Lighthouse is the first federally funded public works project of the newly formed United States government. It was authorized by George Washington and overseen by Alexander Hamilton. The Lighthouse is situated near the “First Landing” site where English settlers first set foot on their way to settle in Jamestown. Built with the same Aquia sandstone as much of Washington, D.C, the lighthouse guided sea travelers to safety for almost 100 years. The distinctive black and white striped “New” Cape Henry Lighthouse was built in 1881 but remains closed to the public.

We were deciding what to do one morning and I remembered seeing there was a lighthouse nearby. We put “lighthouse” into Google Maps and it gave the route to the Cape Henry Lighthouse. We figured we’d drive by and take a look, maybe take some photos.

Well, turns out it’s on a military base – Fort Story. We pull up to the entrance, greeted by Marines with assault rifles. They were quite rude. One demanded to see paperwork on Chip being a service dog. It’s normally not legal to do that, but I don’t know how that applies to the military, so we showed him Chip’s credentials and were allowed on our way.

On our way means we were sent to another checkpoint to park our car, sign in, leave our IDs, get scanned for weapons, and listen to a soldier talk a little about the Lighthouse. Finally a bus took us to the actual lighthouse.

There was a young man at the base of the lighthouse answering questions. He was so helpful and friendly, we got a selfie with him. Here are photos. Click to enlargen.

There was a beach, of course. A huge Atlantic Ocean beach. But it was chilly and sometimes rainy, so we didn’t do that much. We have some video and photos, but only two are worth showing. The one with Chip may be his first time seeing an ocean. We got him at 5 years old, and we don’t know much of his history.