Sue at Norfolk Botanical Gardens. A quiet day before the kids came.

We’re Hampton Public Pier, right downtown in Hampton VA. We’re one block from the NASA Air and Space Museum and a number of restaurants. This area is undergoing a long term revitalization, with a lot of new buildings, wide brick sidewalks, etc. Our rental car is parked right here in the Holiday Inn Crown Plaza garage. We pulled in Saturday after spending one night nearby at Salt Ponds Marina on the lower Chesapeake Bay.

Downtown Hampton Public Pier from the upper deck of the Air & Space museum. We are furthest with our blue dinghy cover on top. Roof for restored carousel is at lower left.

We’ll be here several days while we explore the area. Sue and I saw the Norfolk Botanical Gardens Monday. Not a Brookgreen but very enjoyable, especially to someone who has done as much gardening as Sue. Ethan and Aaron joined us Monday night and we’ve been to the NASA museum with its IMAX theatre, a nearby small history museum and the Virginia Maretime Museum – said to be the largest in the US. We spent today at the Jamestown Settlement. Now we’re back and the kids are fishing off the swim platform.

We’re docked next to a boat that takes people out on 5 hour fishing trips. I’m looking for the right combination of weather and tide to take their early morning trip. Soon the kids will get a dose of culture at the Chrysler Art Museum just a few miles south in Norfolk. One third of its collection is glass which is Sue’s favorite, so we can’t miss that.

An impressive very detailed model of a Venetian galleass at the maritime museum

Will we make it to the battleship Wisconsin, the MacArthur museum or Colonial Williamsburg or a number of other military museums around here or will we take off and explore some of the islands and more rural eastern shore of the Chesapeake before we get up to Annapolis? Too many decisions.

Kids in early English armor at Jamestown. I think its on backwards.

Today was the first day business hasn’t dogged me on the phone and email. During May we put our Coeur d’Alene and Texas condos up for sale and contracted to buy a condo in Sarasota FL, so we have been printing, signing and scanning in documents as well as getting a few appliances fixed, arranging packers, etc. That stuff has still been following me the last few days. The Florida one came up right where Sue wanted it at a very good price after a failed sale, so we decided to get it now. We’ll still be living nearly all the time on the boat for the foreseeable future.