Road Trip to Norfolk

[mrsman]

Just got back from a quick little jaunt from Silver Spring, MD to Norfolk, VA.  My wife had a whole bunch of hotel points that were to expire and the kids were out of school, so we took a quick trip that we booked only a few days ago.  This was my first trip into this part of the state.  Even though I lived in the DC area for almost 15 years, I have never driven south of Potomac Mills before.  (I had flown to Atlanta and Florida previously.)

We left on Sunday at about 11 a.m.  BIG MISTAKE.  We didn't realize that it would be so much traffic since Dr. Gridlock (Wash Post) usually mentions that the Christmas week is less problematic than Thanksgiving regarding the fact that everyone leaves at the same time.  Well, I guess there are enough people who got off for Christmas itself but had to go back to work on Monday.  We sat in traffic with them all!

Nevertheless, the traffic was actually quite productive as we stopped in the Sears Outlet in Potomac Mills and ordered a new refrigerator.  We also stopped in to see the town of Ashland, VA.  There is a converted train station that is a small visitors center.  Trains drive right through the main street of town and we saw three trains drive right through (Amtrak that skipped Ashland, Tropicana freight train, and a very long freight train carrying other things.)

We got to Richmond around twilight time.  Monument Ave was beautiful.  And a very nice holiday display outside of bank buildings on 9th street just south of the Capitol.  It looked like a forest of electric deer.  Then we continued driving to our hotel, just off I-664 in Suffolk.

I have to say that even though it was a little confuisng driving around the area since every freeway is an I-x64, VDOT signed the signs very clearly with clear to understand control cities used throughout.  I also got the opportunity to drive on 664's and 64's bridge-tunnel.

We had some nice warm days over the time period, but we hit the beach on Monday which was cold.  Most of the museums were closed on Monday so that was the day we drove to Va Beach.

Tuesday was our day for touring Norfolk.  As we have kids that don't do well behavior wise, we usually pick free museums so that we don't feel too bad if we have to leave before getting our money's worth.  So after seeing Portsmouth in the car, we took I-264 into Norfolk and spent our time seeeing the MacArthur memorial, HR Naval Musuem, and the US Army Transport Museum in Fort Eustis.  Driving back towards home we took the Jamestown-Scotland ferry on SR 31.  This is a free ferry that takes your car.  We were on the boat "Surry".  We then continued driving on SR 10 to I-295 to I-95 and all the way home.