I am WAY behind on blogging.  We’ve had our best friends visiting and having fun took priority over blogging.  So now I’m going to play catch up.  A couple of weeks ago we finished the Atlantic ICW.  I say good riddance.  We thoroughly enjoyed the towns along the way.  We thoroughly hated 90% of the boating.  It was stressful, narrow, shallow, shoaled in and not enjoyable for Ben.  It took tons of planning every evening to study all hazards and plan around tides, bridge schedules and depths.

We left Coinjock, NC two weeks ago Saturday and had a series of bridge lifts ahead and a lock.  We came through Norfolk, VA and were in awe at the naval warships on all sides for miles and miles.  Ben took lots of pictures.  We also got passed by a couple.  They are LARGE.  And as we looked at them with our binoculars we could see them looking back at us with theirs….and their large guns.  Large naval warships also brought DEEP water.  YAY!

There was a huge festival going on in Norfolk so we moved on through to Hampton, VA and the very bottom of the Chesapeake Bay.  We’ve been hearing about the Chesapeake for months so were excited to arrive.  We didn’t do a lot in Hampton.  The girls enjoyed the carousel and we went to church in a beautiful very old Episcopal church.  We rented a car and caught up on a lot of errands.

The dock master at our marina has a big garden he provides for boaters.  The girls enjoyed pulling carrots and snapping green beans every day we were there.  The tomatoes weren’t ripe yet unfortunately.  Fresh herbs and spices and greens were available as well.

After a couple of nights in Hampton we made our way 25 miles north and anchored in Yorktown.  We spent two nights at anchor right in the York River.  We saw two beautiful sunsets with water that looked like glass.

We took the dinghy into Yorktown and rode the free trolley around to get the lay of the land.  We stopped in another great used book store and grabbed some Ben and Jerry’s.  We were waiting for our friends to arrive to do all of our sight seeing.