Moving On
It’s time to try somewhere new. Gregg,another friend I met in Dubai when he did ski patrol training for the instructors at Ski Dubai, picks me up and we go and meet the newlyweds and friends for a farewell bite before heading for Gregg’s current hometown: Virginia Beach. It’s a short drive and we spend the day catching up on four years’ worth of conversation.
In the evening, we walk to Harpoon Larry’s Oyster Bar. It’s rough and ready – a wooden shack a block from the beach, which looks like a movie set for something like Coyote Ugly. We order blue crabs and a seafood platter of steamed mussels, oysters, snow crab legs, shrimp and crawfish, which are like mini-crayfish with far less meat. The crabs come with two sides, so we opt for baked baby potatoes and hushpuppies. Hushpuppies are balls of fried corn bread. A healthy American snack. Not. Everything is delicious and fresh, since we are right on the ocean.
We walk back along the beach. Like Venice Beach, it’s quite wide with golden sand, but the strip along the beach is lined with hotels. It still has the unnecessary additional theme-park elements, but it’s a balmy evening and after the buzz of the wedding, it’s nice to have some down time.
On the Water
After an enormous breakfast of fresh fruit, eggs and pikelets with maple syrup, exercise is necessary. We drive to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, an 8,000-acre fresh water refuge bordering the Atlantic Ocean, where wehire kayaks. We spend a few pleasant hours paddling our way through the waterways. We don’t see any fish, but spot a few ospreys flying overhead. It is very peaceful, apart from the fighter jets that zoom over every half hour or so from the naval air station Oceana. It’s amazing how quickly it becomes a background noise.
As the wind picks up and the sky clouds over, we paddle back and drive into town. Gregg continues on chef duty, whipping up Coq Au Vin for dinner. I have a second phone interview for a volunteer role in Vietnam. It seems to go well and I wonder if this will end my American story. I shrug it off and enjoy my home-cooked dinner, complemented by one of the bottles of wine the groom’s sister smuggled out of her brother’s wedding. Australians, honestly.
Swinging
Chef has the day off, so we eat breakfast by the beach. My culinary adventure for today is grits. Don’t try them. They are the leftovers of corn after all the good bits are gone, ground into a gelatinous paste kind of like porridge, but with less flavour. I have them plain - without the shrimps in the picture. I'm left asking why? Just why?
The next challenge is to try and get a vaccination I’m due for. After several phone calls we are told it can be done at the Virginia Beach Department of Health – guess they’re not just paper pushers like the Australian Department of Health. They lied. They send us away. I can’t get a regular appointment with a doctor – there is a waiting list until September. Others won’t accept new patients. In desperation, we try the “doc in a box” service – these are clinics that provide urgent care but it’s said the doctors may no longer be at the top of their game. It’s only a vaccination. It works, but we have to go back to the part of town we started in, so that takes a large part of the afternoon.
The highlight, bizarrely, is a stop at Mount Trashmore. This was previously the municipal tip, but has been covered with turf and is the highest point in the region. Now is the time to point out that the region is extremely flat. The use of the word mountain is an exaggeration, but the hill is green and doesn’t smell, despite the vent pipe there to siphon off the methane produced. Funnily enough, Virginia Beach didn’t have a town centre until about 1998 and when they decided to develop one, they stuck it within a couple of kilometres of the old tip. Nice.
Our beach plans have been ruined by doctors and rain, so after a quick change we drive to Norfolk, about forty minutes away, for a swing dancing class. It is a small class of only five students in the lobby of a theatre. The style is Jitterbug Swing, which is new to me. The teacher races through a number of moves and picks on each of us individually as we learn, which is a little disconcerting. After the class more dancers join for a freestyle session. My favourite quote of the evening is “She is as cute as a bug’s ear.”
We dine at A.W. Shucks. Seafood galore. We have a shrimp cocktail, flash-fried calamari and another seafood platter with the usual suspects – mussels, oysters, snow crab legs, prawns, cockles, hushpuppies, potatoes and spicy sausage. Apparently it’s called a low country boil. I’m a fan.
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