Day to Regroup

The vacation, as previous posts may have indicated, has not been completely smooth. Yesterday was the first really by-the-book, as-planned day. Today (Wednesday, August 22, though this post will go up after midnight), at midweek, we took a down day, to get our act together, rest and recover. Tam and Sarah got haircuts, I did a laundry, Tam and Sarah spent quite a bit of time in the hotel pool, and Tam and I crashed for maybe a two hour nap in the afternoon while Sarah watched cartoons on TV. We ate at an old-fashioned hot dog joint in Newport News for lunch (Gus's Hot Dog King) and at a great, small, mom-and-pop Italian restaurant tucked into a shopping mall (Mamma Lina's) for dinner. [UPDATE: We went back for pizza our last night in Newport News.] Sarah liked it so much she asked if we could make them honorary members of our family. I'll blog about them instead. A guy dressed as a chef came out and asked if everything was okay in a sort of New York/Italian accent; Sarah asked if he was the chef and he said, "I'm the chef, the pizza guy, the manager and the owner." I guess that means he's also Mamma Lina, but we didn't ask. [UPDATE: Later I saw a review saying Mamma Lina's son runs the place now so I guess that's him.] Very good Italian food for a shopping mall. We may go back before we leave. Sarah still wants them to be honorary family members.

I know I've blogged more on weekend trips to Baltimore than I have on this week-long vacation. Mostly it's because we've been feeling poorly. We all started with pinkeye; Tam and I have some kind of coughing/nose running/eye itching thing that could be allergies, a summer cold, or a low-grade bug of some sort. I've also got diarrhea. I have an untreated hernia (I won't burden you with the details right now, but it'll be fixed soon I hope), and everytime I cough I pull bits and pieces of my abdomen apart, and it hurts.

Okay, enough about my intestines and such. We're doing okay, though the first couple of days were a washout and there've been a couple of bad thunderstorms while we've been here. The hotel pool at least, is indoors; pics of Sarah's increasing prowess at swimming are on the YouTube site. We haven't actually been at a beach yet though we did see the ocean yesterday. Tam and I like the open, bare beach at Cape Henry in Fort Story at the First Landing Site, where the Jamestown colonists erected their first cross and where one of the country's oldest lighthouses still stands, but Sarah says she wants an urban beach, so we'll go to Virginia Beach tomorrow and re-visit the Virginia Aquarium so she can pet the stingrays some more. It amazes me that she loves it so much; when younger at most touch tanks/petting zoos etc., she insisted Tam or I do the actual touching while she watched. And the stingrays are amazingly friendly for creatures not as far evolved as sharks: they seem to like being touched, stick their noses (if that's the right term) out of the water and flap their wings against the side of the tank.

Sarah wants one as a pet, but for that, I think, we can cite the laws to say we can't do it.

More tomorrow.

UPDATE: Belatedly it occurs to me I should record for the record where we're staying: it's here.