Hartian Family Vacation to Williamsburg! (And, Uh, Some Other Places.) – Thursday

Man, this week has gone by fast! (I’m writing this on Friday. Forgetting to blog Tuesday messed my schedule up.😂)

We actually got up on time this morning, so we went to Newport News, which hosts the largest Naval base in the world. You know what was cool?! We got to go in a tunnel bridge. We got to go under the water, and it had to be deep enough, that a ship could go over it. One that had its keel like 46 feet in the water. It was awesome, and so are the italics. 😏

Anyway, we were trying to make the 11:00 bus tour to see the war ships and the rest of the Naval base, but the 11:00 one was sold out so, we had 30 minutes to kill as we waited for the next tour. Apparently, the only things around where the tours are held are restaurants…. We looked at the gift shop for a little, then decided to just drive around so we could see some of the Island. Unfortunately, it took us a very long time to get out because of traffic, so we ended up having to come back so we didn’t miss the tour (tours took about an hour).

It was pretty neat. We got to see some really cool ships (I would tell you their names, but I, uh, might have forgotten…) We were not allowed to take any close up pictures on the bus tour of the boats. (They did stop in a parking lot a little ways away so we could take pictures of the ships from there, but there were buildings and stuff in the way :-/). We saw houses built for the Jamestown Exposition (not to be confused with Jamestowne), houses that some active duty and retired officers live in, a hospital, a plane hospital and the Ely Memorial Park, which as far as I could tell, was where they commemorated old planes.🤷🏻‍♀️

After the bus tour, we hurried (as best we could) to where we had another tour at 14:00 (2:00 pm). We saw this really cool old church on the way. Because the roads were so congested, we actually ended up getting there at around 1:48, so we parked in a parking garage and walked straight to the Nauticus museum where our tour was. The boat we rode on was a double decker. We saw these ships with yellow and blue bands around the top. Apparently, they are supply or medical boats and have no weapons, so firing upon them instantly means a declaration of war. 😱

We saw the U.S.S. Wisconsin, which fought in WWII and is so large that if it goes through the Panama Canal there is only a foot of clearance on either side. 😱 We sat on the upper deck of our boat. It got so windy that Elie and Brynn’s hair flew around and whipped people in the face. (Well, it whipped me in the face. I declared that if you magnified the hair x1000, and put it on a boat, It would make a very lethal weapon. 😏) Of course, because Kenna forgot to plug her camera in it died half way through the boat ride, and she had to rely on Dad’s phone.  It didn’t have as good a zoom as the camera did, but I did get some decent pictures with it.

When the spoken part of the tour was over, and we started heading back, they played music. One of the songs was God Bless the U.S.A. I honestly thought that instead of “God Bless the U.S.A.”, I was going to hear “God Bless you Chick-fil-a!”😑 (For those of you that don’t know, that is a song by Christian comedian Tim Hawkins).  We ended up going to the bow of the boat after the spoken part of the tour was done and let the wind whip our faces. Ricky did this amazing dance on the deck that prompted Dad to tell us about the time I did the same thing on a boat in the Caribbean when I was like a year old, which then led to us discussing how much we wanted to go on a cruise. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I suppose that’s just the way we work. 😁 As we were driving back across the bridge, we Facebook Lived our journey through the tunnel bridge, then broke out a pack of Bible trivia questions and started doing a trivia game. (I sincerely apologise to all four viewers that had to suffer through that 😁). Then we went to Chownings Tavern for dinner.