Today we are leaving beautiful Norfolk and driving north to Washington, DC. The day is partially overcast so we are not going to be driving in the hot such which is excellent! Before we leave though some pictures of our lovely hotel room at the Sheraton Norfolk Waterfront.
Funny story – other than it being VERY high – the 4 poster bed was the highlight of the suite in more ways that one! The king mattress was very soft and almost too comfortable, however it did not really fit the bed which was a strange size. Underneath it were 2 twin box springs. The bed was okay, once I figured how to pole jump into it however when getting out of it in the morning the twin box spring underneath fell to the ground and caused my side of the bed to collapse! That both woke me up fast and was a bit scary! So while we were out, they brought engineering to fix the bed. The next day the same thing happened but to Andrew! So this time I went to the front desk and had a chat with them about it. About an hour later I received a phone call from the Assistant GM, Chris apologizing for the issue and telling me that they were puzzled how the bed was collasping so he went and looked at it and he found out that it is the ONLY bed of its type in the whole hotel! Engineering came and fixed it again by putting a brace between the two box springs so they would not move and also a sheet of plywood on top just as an added layer of safety. This suite, which is a Junior Suite, used to be named the Presidential Suite and thus the “Presidential” type of bed. The only issue is it is now a wheelchair accessible suite and that bed is too high for someone in a wheelchair to transfer into… Other than that it was a very beautiful room!
The other good news is I have figured out that the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, while a toll road, one can pay the toll at a toll booth so we are good to go and take my originally planned route to Washington, DC! This will take us over the Bay Bridge Tunnel and up the Virginia/Maryland peninsula on a state highway before crossing over into Washington, DC. On the other route, we would be driving Interstate freeways, which are MUCH less exciting at times – the concrete jungle! Here are some pictures of us crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel which while I remember it being a VERY LONG transit, when sitting in the back of a station wagon as a child, with very hot and muggy, it was much shorter and more pleasant this time!
Wow – $16.00 later and we are now across the 28 km bridge and tunnel and onto land again! We followed State Route 13 up the peninsula until I had the brilliant idea of wanting to see the Atlantic one more time – so we deviated over to Chincoteague Island to check it out! What a cute community it is! More of a vacation/summer destination it looked like however there is definitely a risk to living there – it is on a delta – which we drove across and flooding would be a HUGE problem as you will see in the pictures below. I did not take that many pictures on the drive as I was enjoying it myself and doing some knitting at the same time. Then the sun started to set and that was the end of my ability to snap pictures for the day easily from the car!
So we are now back on the State Route 13 and drove non-stop, avoiding toll roads (which was not that hard from this direction) into Washington DC. Our hotel, the Residence Inn Downtown is smack in the middle of downtown, fairly close to the White House in terms of tourist sights.
I found out that Andrew and I have two VERY different driving styles at this point. Andrew is a VERY good driver and does excellent on highways and I know that he loves to drive. However I have driven in Washington DC previously and he has not. We had a BIT of tension while navigating the downtown area as like Vancouver they have one way streets, you cannot turn on right and they have fairly large traffic circles. Due to my past driving experience when working for Class Software and we did not have phones or GPS’s to guide us, I used to memorize where I needed to go using acronyms for the streets. I still practice that today to a lesser extent as we do have Google Maps. However, I also drive (which means I navigate too) by feel and Andrew needs advance warning and that does not mesh with driving in some city dy. Very confusing! Oh well, we made it, got checked in and into our hotel room and the valet (only option) parked the car for the night at a whopping $54.00! Good thing we are returning the car tomorrow!
