Sunday, June 1, 2008

We rode our bikes from our house in West Park View, Portsmouth, to the High Street Landing and took the Elizabeth River Ferry ($1 each way) over to Waterside Festival Marketplace. We called ahead to ensure we could take our bikes on the ferry, and we could.

After we got to the other side, we rode our bikes to Nauticus and the Battleship Wisconsin. We learned that the cost for the first two floors and access to the Battleship was free, but it costs $10.95 per person to access the thid floor which has a theater, a shark touch tank and interactive exhibits for kids. Since we weren't interested in watching any kind of naval show, are completely against animals used for our entertainment, and aren't/don't have kids, we decided to forgo the, in our opinion, expensive museum cost. The battleship was pretty cool, and I really enjoyed the art gallery that was on the 2nd floor, but sadly the most exciting part of the day was that we got to check out the mammoth Carnival Victory cruise ship that was leaving for the first cruise of the season from the Cruise Norfolk port, right outside the Nauticus. We really would like to go on one of those cruises one of these days. We watched people unloading from big black limo-suburbans, taxi cabs, greyhound buses, and SUVs and luxury cars full of familes, couples, ladies groups, couples of couples, retirees, and groups of people traveling with so much luggage it was apparent that some were not intending on coming back. It was quite a fascincating process.

We got hungry and decided to bike back to Waterside and have lunch. We walked by every restaurant looking for one that might have a veggie burger, and only found one, at Waterside Burger Works. I had the most amazing gardenburger and fries and was so pleased, no, ecstatic, to find somewhere at Waterside I can actually eat vegetarian. Woohoo!!!

We took the ferry back to the High Street Landing and rode our bikes home. We were tired and hot and aside from another Slurpee and a scratch off lottery ticket at 7-11, we stayed home and relaxed the rest of the evening. We had planned to drive to Crawford Bay around 7:00 pm to watch the Carnival Victory ship depart for the Bahamas, but when I looked it up online when we got home, we saw we already "missed the boat" which left at 5:00 pm, just minutes after we arrived home.