No matter what time of year you come, you will find Virginia Beach offering up something for each visitor. With more than 20 miles of shoreline and a boardwalk that is 3 miles long, you will find something to keep you entertained from sun up…Read More

No matter what time of year you come, you will find Virginia Beach offering up something for each visitor. With more than 20 miles of shoreline and a boardwalk that is 3 miles long, you will find something to keep you entertained from sun up to sunset and well into the wee hours. No matter what your into, you will find it here in Virginia Beach.

In the summer, this place comes alive with visitors who flock to this family-friendly destination. You can just pull up your beach chair and towel and just roast in the summer sun for hours. Make sure to turn over or take an occasional break by jumping in…the water is just fine here. Lifeguards are on duty and there are public restrooms along the boardwalk.

After you have finished blistering take the time to ramble along the boardwalk. You can bike or roller blade here too. Enjoy the carefully sculpted landscaping, beaches, and sculptures spotted throughout the boardwalk. At 31st and Atlantic, you will find the fascinating King Neptune statue. This 26 foot tall, 12-ton statue of the King of the Seas, was dedicated in 1974 to Richard Kline and Fredrick Napolitano. These 2 businessmen helped organize the King Neptune Festival held every September.

Along the boardwalk and at the fishing pier you will find a mixture of shops for the utmost shop-a-holic. From post cards and the request family left behind souvenirs to beach inspired outwear, you will be sure to leave your wallet a little lighter than when you started. After a day of shopping, you can fuel your appetite at numerous restaurants in the area. From uncomplicated to fanciful, foodies can knosh on homemade sandwiches to upscale specialties. Of course since you at the ocean, there is no scarcity of seafood to please your pallet. Once your ready for a night of partying you will find dozens of bars and nightclubs along the main strand. Then once you’re ready to call it a night you can lay your head in everything for top rated beachfront properties to those quite and enchanting places quietly tucked into every nook around.

When Virginia Beach throws a party everyone is invited. Throughout the year you will find numerous events. Amongst the biggest are the Waterfront Arts festival held in late April, Beach Music Weekend in Mid May, the Boardwalk Arts show is mid June, the largest music event on the east coast is the American Music Festival held over Labor Day, and rounding out the summer merriment is the Neptune Festival in late September.

If you’re looking for a fun time with fewer crowds, head here during the winter months. With the mild climate and astounding winter sunsets, this may very well become your annual holiday getaway. From mid-November until New Years enjoy the twinkling lights found in the holiday at the beach lights festival. Visitors can load up and drive along the boardwalk and take in the pageantry of the more than 250 light displays by local businesses and organizations. You will find the beach less frenzied and prices that make your wallet happy too.

For more information head over to www.vbfun.com. They have a variety of lodging and vacation packages to suit both you and your wallet. Close

DO NOT FEED THE WILDFOWL (sign prominently posted at the edge of Lake Trashmore)Sunday’s quiet is rent by a cacophony of screeches, honks, and hisses. Hundreds of ducks, geese, and gulls are afloat and aflap on the surface of Lake Trashmore. We’ve…Read More

DO NOT FEED THE WILDFOWL

(sign prominently posted at the edge of Lake Trashmore)


Sunday’s quiet is rent by a cacophony of screeches, honks, and hisses. Hundreds of ducks, geese, and gulls are afloat and aflap on the surface of Lake Trashmore. We’ve come out early this morning, armed with a kite and curiosity, hoping to enjoy a family outing at Mount Trashmore, one of the country’s first experimental trash-based parks.

Mount Trashmore is the product of what in retrospect was a blindingly obvious idea. Rather than continue to add to an unsightly and expensive landfill, which involved digging and filling a succession of enormous holes, the solid waste was instead heaped high, then covered with dirt. The resulting mountain and surrounding area were then converted into a park. The dirt needed for this process was taken from a site adjacent to the trash mountain, thus creating the lake.

We’d seen the 60-foot tall "mountain" when first driving along the expressway toward Virginia Beach. In fact, we couldn’t have missed it. The Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Hampton Roads coastal area is completely flat, an immense network of suburbs and shopping malls radiating from the original beach- and river-front towns, merging into one other without discernible boundaries. The irony of the area’s most prominent landmark being made of the inevitable by-products of suburban sprawl was not lost on us. Even more ironic are recent suggestions that the name "Mount Trashmore" be changed, as certain civic promoters do not feel it is sufficiently dignified.

On this cold and piercingly blue-sky bright morning, we stand in the parking lot adjacent to the lake and regard the birds. If the public obeys the sign, why are they here? Most numerous and loudest are the gulls, endlessly engaged in their internecine squabbles, periodically rising from the water in quarrelsome clumps. Is there, I wonder, a collective term for gulls? Let’s think: a bevy of quail, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows... Perhaps an umbrage of gulls? What brings these creatures, symbols of the sea, so far inland?

If I could change this mouldy me,

By heaven! I would choose the lot,

Of all the gypsy birds, to be

A gull that spans the spacious sea.

"Grey Gull," Robert Service

The word "seagull," I have learned, is a misnomer. Gulls are not pelagic; that is, they do not live primarily out in open oceans or seas, as do shearwaters, albatrosses, terns, and petrels. They are coastal inhabitants, but venture far inland following the course of rivers and streams. Gulls are opportunistic scavengers; they go wherever the pickings are best. They are not dependent on a particular environment or food source, and they have few natural enemies. And, most importantly, they have been able to take full advantage of the habits of another highly successful species:

Us.

Gull populations have exploded along the Atlantic coast and elsewhere the past fifty years or so, mostly as a direct result of the human predicament. Gulls, of course, prosper when there is a plentiful source of garbage. Wherever new sources of food become available, their population steadily increases. A gull needs only fifteen minutes or so of earnest gorging at a fish processing plant, garbage dump, sewage plant, amusement park, or fast-food parking lot to supply its daily nutritional needs. The rest of the day, a gull is free to loaf where he pleases. ("Loaf," by the way, is the actual term employed by ornithologists to describe what a gull does when not eating, breeding, or roosting.) The usual loafing site is some pond or open expanse of grass not far from his food source. A grassy sports field or hillside park is an ideal place. Mount Trashmore, for example, is prime gull loafing territory, even without fresh garbage.

My husband and son are flying a kite on top of Mount Trashmore. As this artificial structure is the only hill for miles around, it provides a good, stiff, kite-flying wind even on a relatively calm morning. The city of Virginia Beach stretches out below us, but I’m looking up, not down. I am watching the kite dip and soar, but I am thinking about gulls.

Gulls are highly resourceful, built for versatility rather than specialization. They can drink both fresh and salt water, a trait they share with sea turtles, and are similarly equipped with glands that enable them to flush the salt from their systems through openings in their bills. Gulls learn quickly, and there are even some indications that they may share information on sources of food. They consume practically anything, alive or dead. They are not picky eaters.

While gulls are gregarious and form large colonies, they often exhibit as much or more antagonism toward members of their own species as toward others. They are a long-lived species, living as long as 40 years in captivity. In the wild there are frequent instances of cannibalism of eggs and chicks, as well as deaths resulting from defending territory from other gulls. Gulls are efficient thieves, snatching food from each other or birds such as pelicans. In fact, gulls have been implicated in the decline of other shore birds, such as plovers and terns. They thrive at the expense of less versatile and aggressive species.

We’ve come down from Mount Trashmore, on the side opposite the parking lot, to an elaborate play area known as Kid’s Cove. My son is on the cusp of being too old for this sort of playground, at least in the presence of his peers, but no one is here yet today to observe him, so he begs us to stay a while so that he can play. Not long after my husband and I arrange ourselves on a sunny bench nearby, a gull arrives.

Gulls, I reflect, don’t like us much. This gull perches on one of the wooden pylons that make up the "pirate fort" of the playground and dispassionately watches us with unwavering interest. Are we going to oblige him by having a picnic? We size each other up, the gull and I, and I admire his somewhat vicious beak, strong legs, and solid body. I have no idea what the gull is thinking, if anything, but I’m sure he doesn’t entertain romantic notions about how wonderful it is to be a human, whereas we have written poems, songs, and stories about the adventurous, freewheeling lives of gulls. This is one major difference between gulls and humans, regardless of what else we have in common.

The animals in our immediate environment are not really wild, so much as merely able to tolerate our presence. Our gardens and wooded suburban lots, for example, are virtual buffets for deer, whose populations have reached epidemic proportions in the sprawling suburbs that best suit them. In turn, the deer we hit with our cars become a different sort of buffet for vultures. Increasingly, the animals around us are those who can find a secure niche in a man-altered environment.

What is wildlife? Mostly we apply this term to the creatures frequenting our back yards or those that can be relegated to land unsuitable for development. The species that we don’t tolerate are known as pests, while those who actively court us are known as pets. Gulls have reached pest status in certain parts of the country, as the publication of manuals for gull control testifies. They contaminate water supplies, act as vectors for disease, and interfere with air traffic. And, of course, in many places they have simply become noisy, defecating nuisances.

Alfred Hitchcock knew a thing or two when he used gulls as the most threatening species in The Birds, but gulls, of course, are no more than bellwethers of the threat we pose to ourselves. On this lovely morning, sitting next to a buried mountain of trash, gulls momentarily become symbols to me, but not the symbols of freedom that once spanned the spacious seas in Robert Service’s poem. No, apart from themselves and in relationship to all others, gulls are symbols in the calculus of survival.

Both Cape Henry Lighthouses are located within Ft. Story (US ARMY) at North end of beach. Follow Atlantic north to bend in road. Turn off to right and continue to follow the beach to Ft. Story. Heightened security due to war and terrorism…Read More

Both Cape Henry Lighthouses are located within Ft. Story (US ARMY) at North end of beach. Follow Atlantic north to bend in road. Turn off to right and continue to follow the beach to Ft. Story. Heightened security due to war and terrorism threats. Visitors must enter and leave fort at East Gate- this entrance. Bring photo ID. Be prepared for visual inspection of car - trunk, hood, underneath. Old lighthouse may be open during midday. Newer lighthouse is still in use. July 2004 dome of old lighthouse surrounded with yellow ribbon. Also on historic route, First Landing Cross.

Dolphins - may be visible at anytime - anywhere along beach in the summer. Watch for pointed fins. They swim in groups and may be seen leaping. Often we have seen them just beyond the pier at dawn. This year we saw them at 10:30 am at about 10th St. This year a storm washed up live whelks and a dead puffer fish. First time we ever saw them in over 40 years of VA beach visits.

Seashore State Park. Follow shore drive north of Ft. Story. Turn left at park entrance (camping on right).

Entrance $3. Wear bug repellant. Go early before heat. Go to visitor center. Take Bald Cypress trail- circle route around swamp 1.5 miles (road goes back to parking lot - don't cross the road for shorter route - or just go to first lookout if unable to hike) - boardwalk over wetlands - watch for Spanish moss hanging from Bald Cypress, Cypress "knees" - protruding roots, turtles, ducks, and listen to frogs. Pirates came here to get fresh water. Bike trail and longer trails available

Farmer's market 3640 Dam Neck. 12-5 Sun, 10-5 Mon - Sat.
Fresh corn, peaches, produce, cute shops, antiques, restaurant.

Williamsburg Pottery Factory - not worth the drive and hassles with tunnel traffic.

The most direct way to get to VA Beach from Washington D.C. is I-95 South to I-64 across the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel to I-264 - The Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway. However, there can be a lot of traffic on I-64, which moves slowly. An…Read More

The most direct way to get to VA Beach from Washington D.C. is I-95 South to I-64 across the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel to I-264 - The Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway. However, there can be a lot of traffic on I-64, which moves slowly.

An alternate but longer route is to take I-95 south from Richmond, exit U.S. 460 at Petersburg; follow 460, which intersects with I-64 in Chesapeake; take I-64 to I-264 - The Virginia Beach-Norfolk Expressway.

The most direct route from a northeast city like New York is U.S. 13 South through Virginia's Eastern Shore and across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, which is an experience in itself. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel is a four-lane, 20-mile-long toll crossing of the lower Chesapeake Bay. It was designated "One of the Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World." There is even a restaurant and a gift shop on one of the manmade islands that connect the bridges.

Be careful - when leaving VA Beach TAKE exit 14, which is I-64 N, to get back through the tunnel. If you miss the exit, you will find yourself heading across the bridge into Portsmith. (I have done this twice.) If you miss the exit, it is much quicker just to turn around than it is to take I-664 back to Hampton. The bridge into Portsmith is a drawbridge, and if you have impeccably poor timing as I did, you will get to experience the bridge opening to let a boat through.

If you are flying in, consider Norfolk International Airport as an alternative to the busier Richmond International Airport. There are six major airlines that service this airport: Continental, American, Delta, Northwest, Southwest, and Independence Air.

Norfolk Airport: http://www.norfolkairport.com/

In the summer months, from May until Labor Day, every weekend there is the most exciting and impressive fireworks display at the beach. It can be seen from ANY hotel room or the boardwalk (where you can rollerblade, rent tandem bikes, etc.). I personally enjoyed sitting…Read More

In the summer months, from May until Labor Day, every weekend there is the most exciting and impressive fireworks display at the beach. It can be seen from ANY hotel room or the boardwalk (where you can rollerblade, rent tandem bikes, etc.). I personally enjoyed sitting at one of the outdoor cafes with a beverage and watching the display.

In the wintertime, they decorate the beach as well as the boardwalk with light displays. The boardwalk is closed to pedestrian traffic during this time, and you are able to drive the entire boardwalk to see everything! They even sell cookies and drinks for you to enjoy as you drive through. In September, there is special treat on the boardwalk: thousands of vendors displaying a varied selection of merchandise, such as art, jewelry, candles, and the like. I suggest booking way in advance if you plan on being there during this time!

If there is one thing that I hate the most on vacation, it is people constantly try to sell you timeshares or vacation rentals. On the first day, we could not walk down 2 city blocks without some college aged guy asking us "where are…Read More

If there is one thing that I hate the most on vacation, it is people constantly try to sell you timeshares or vacation rentals.

On the first day, we could not walk down 2 city blocks without some college aged guy asking us "where are we from?". I made the mistake of telling him. He then proceeded to offer us "free" dinners if we would listen to his pitch.

After about what seemed to be 10 minutes of him telling us how great it would be to be able to come down every year and stay in 4-star resort for cheap, I politely declined and we continued on our way. We didn't get more than 2 blocks when another college aged guy asked us "Where are we from?". After learning my lesson from the first encounter I told him that we were locals and continued on our way.

During our 3 day stay, my family was approached no less than a dozen times from the "land sharks".

If you are visiting Virginia Beach for the first time, avoid any stand our kiosk that is offering anything free. It will turn out to be some company trying to sell you something.

Now, I didn't bring a family.  It was my husband and me only, but we are very young at heart.  We LOVE video games.  And did we ever find a haven to go to for that outlet--Flipper McCoys (I don't know if it is still…Read More

Now, I didn't bring a family.  It was my husband and me only, but we are very young at heart.  We LOVE video games.  And did we ever find a haven to go to for that outlet--Flipper McCoys (I don't know if it is still open, but I would guess it is).  It was along the main street, or the boardwalk, and it was filled with both old and new video games.  We spent hours playing our favorite stand-up games--Centipede, MS. PACMAN, Galaga, Police Trainer, and Elevator Action.

We have Week #9 (the first week of March) at VA Beach. We are not sun and surf people, so we don't mind being at the beach in the off-season. Actually, everything is more relaxing without the beach crowds. This year, the…Read More

We have Week #9 (the first week of March) at VA Beach. We are not sun and surf people, so we don't mind being at the beach in the off-season. Actually, everything is more relaxing without the beach crowds. This year, the weather was unbelievable. The first weekend was just a bit warmer than normal, with temperatures in the 60s. However, by the time we left on Friday, the temperature was 82. My son was actually on the beach in shorts on March 3. He even stuck his toes in the water (big mistake: water was still too cold, but it was fun to hear him shriek). I hope we are this lucky every year. Maybe next time we will actually see a whale on the whale-watching cruise.Close

For those of you with an interest in history, this particular area is chock full. Besides Colonial Williamsburg, there are other historic areas nearby, including Yorktown and Jamestown. It is a very easy drive from Virginia Beach and could easily be done as…Read More

For those of you with an interest in history, this particular area is chock full. Besides Colonial Williamsburg, there are other historic areas nearby, including Yorktown and Jamestown. It is a very easy drive from Virginia Beach and could easily be done as a day trip. Mid-summer is probably not the best time to go because the heat is excessive, but then you have that wonderful beach to go back to if you are staying in Virginia Beach. Lots to see and do in the area. Brush up on your American history with a first-hand look at the past. They have wonderful re-enactments of what colonial life was like. Life was very hard for the colonials. It really makes you appreciate what you have now and take for granted, at least in a material sense. Close

No matter how many times we use this connection, I am amazed at its construction. It is truly a feat in human engineering. For 17 miles, you alternate between driving over and then under the water. The Chesapeake Bay is truly a…Read More

No matter how many times we use this connection, I am amazed at its construction. It is truly a feat in human engineering. For 17 miles, you alternate between driving over and then under the water. The Chesapeake Bay is truly a monstrous quantity of water. You can't see land anywhere around you. The connection is made (from the north) by Rt. 13. When you are driving on the Bay Bridge-Tunnel, and you look ahead, and all of a sudden the road disappears, it gives you a very eerie feeling. The cost to use this road is $10.00 for cars. The only break in the drive is a restaurant, which most people stop at, I am sure, plus you get a free coupon when you enter the toll booth at the beginning of your trip. The restaurant has a very nice view, as the tables overlook the water. There is also a pier which you can fish from, if you want to spend the extra time. More ways to spend your money - there is a gift shop. Very enjoyable and scenic ride from beginning to end. Beats I-95 in my book any day!Close