Virginia Adventure

I just got home from a fantastic couple of days with my brother. Nothing extraordinary, but definitely nice to get away for a few days and to see him since it'll be a while before I do again. Anywho, here's a play-by-play of what went down!

Wednesday- I took off in the morning from Wichita and had a looong lay-over in Atlanta. It gave me some down-time, but it was annoying to have to keep looking at the board to confirm when I was going to get out of there. It would switch from leaving at 5:35 to 6:38 and back and forth...needless to say, I basically stuck near my gate the whole time so that it wouldn't leave without me. Oh Delta... Finally got out of there and landed in Newport News around 7 that evening. Jake picked me up, got me settled in my hotel (that was an adventure of its own, because they couldn't find my reservation!), and we went out to eat at Red Robin...yum! We caught up over dinner and he took me back to my hotel so I could get to bed.

Thursday- Jake picked me up and took me on a tour of Langley. Very impressive! Besides the airplane displays, which I always find neat, he showed me the officer's housing (which is quite impressive) and we drove by some other stuff like the NASA research center there. We went to his dorm to print off the addresses of a couple of places we wanted to try to hit up and then we ate at the golf club there on base. (Oh, they're literally right off of Chesapeake Bay! So I got to see a lot of water lol.) Our first stop of the day was at the Virginia Living Museum. There was all kinds of stuff. Besides a nature center and a planetarium, there were quite a few exhibits that were about the natural Virginia wildlife and geography, and featured there until September was a (moving) dinosaur exhibit...it kinda freaked me out whenever I would walk by a T-rex and it would move and growl right at me...um yeah lol. After that we stopped at McD's for some lunch and decided to waste some time until dinner and go see Despicable Me :D. When we went into the theatre, it was quite cloudless outside...it's been the hottest summer in a long time there...when we came out of the movie...hello massive rainfall! It was already up to my ankles...yipes! We ran to the car, made it back to base, and chilled in his room until it finally let up (with as low-lying as some of the area is, some of the cars had water up to the middle of their tires!). We went out to eat that night with a couple of his friends from work.

Friday- Busch Gardens!!!!!! This place was amazing! It's expensive if you don't have any coupons, but with Jake's free military pass and a $10 coupon we used for me, it only cost us about $50 to get in...not bad with all this place has to offer! It was split up into different European countries...Europe, Ireland, Scotland, France, New France (Canada), Italy, and Germany. Each place had it's own themed rides, themed shops with very good quality, an amazing place overall. I highly recommend it, it was a very good time. My bro and I hit up shows mostly...Pet Shenanigans (Ireland), Irish Dancing (Ireland again) and Italian entertainment (you guess :P). The Irish dancing was amazing...aaaand Jake had a good time with that lol. We got out of there around 4, which worked out well, cause we got through the rush hour traffic there fairly well. We went back to base and bowled a few rounds at the newly refurbished bowling alley. It was about time to wrap up the day, so we just watched Sherlock Holmes in the small entertainment room on his floor of the dorms.

Saturday (today)- Jake picked me up at 5:30, and my flight left about 8:00 from Newport News. Had to get off and reboard at Atlanta, and then flew to Memphis, which I liked a lot. It wasn't huge and overpowering, and they had some cool little shops with Elvis, rock & roll, Johnny Cash, and Memphis memorabilia. I flew out from there and landed in Wichita around 4pm-ish! And now just to wait for my luggage to get here lol. Overall a pretty good time!