Everybody Loves VD: Girls' Weekend!

A couple months ago, Ellie mentioned that she had a conference in the Virginia Beach area and was going to see if our friend, Sarah, who lives in DC would like to join her. There's a chance I may have invited myself, but for the purpose of this story, we'll say Ellie invited me to come along.

Ellie and I flew into DC on Thursday night (October 6th) and Sarah picked us up at the airport before whisking us away to Old Town Alexandria (which might be 10 minutes away from Regan Int'l). We ate at an awesome pizza place (very reminiscent of Il Vicino for those of you who are lucky enough to have eaten there) and then went back to Sarah's place. I had never been there so I got the grand tour. They have a very lovely home in south Alexandria which they purchased within a month of when we bought our home in San Antonio.

Sarah shows off her very beautiful kitchen!

The next morning we had breakfast with my mom before hitting the road to Hampton, VA. There was talk of going to Colonial Williamsburg. We saw that it cost about $45 and we decided we could put that money to better use at the Williamsburg Primium Outlet Stores. And so we did. We hit up Nine West and Anne Taylor and I think everyone was pleased with their purchases.

On Saturday, Ellie was speaking at her conference so Sarah and I were on our own. Lucky for us, the hotel was right across the street from an outdoor mall. We grabbed some breakfast at Panera before doing a bit more shopping. Seeing as it was OU/TX weekend, it was sort of necessary that I watched them game. After finding some uninspiring sports bars on Yelp, we remembered we could go back to the room and watch it! The right team one and by the time we'd scoped out some dinner places Ellie was done for the day and we headed down to Norfolk for dinner.

We ate at a cute little place near the Medical Center. We shared a bottle of wine and lots of fun memories. After dinner we decided we should see what Granby St. was all about since most of the nightlife establishments seemed to be located here. After witnessing some rowdy protesters barreling down the street (we originally thought they were part of the Occupy movement, but later decided they were a religious organization), we ducked into a little Irish pub on the corner. We unknowingly took a seat at a table too close to the stage and later garnished unwanted attention from the Irish guy who sang traditional Irish tunes accompanied by his guitar and some rockin' midi background music.

On Sunday, we headed to Virginia Beach to hike in the marshland of First Landing State Park. We figured we hiked about 7-7.5 miles. There was some very cool scenery including lots of Spanish Moss:

Beautiful view of the bay:

And pretty beaches:

We were pretty exhausted when we got home so after we all got cleaned up we went to Target to get some wine. (And do some more shopping, of course. It is girls weekend after all.) On the way to Target we had seen a restaurant that had fire pits on the patio. We decided to stop there to get some food before going back to the hotel.

On Monday morning Sarah and I dropped Ellie off at the airport in Norfolk before heading back to DC. We had lunch with my mom and I moved my luggage from Sarah's car to my mom's before Mom took me back to see her condo. Mom also lives in Alexandria in a very pretty high rise.

I reminded Mom that, although I've been to DC many times before, I'd never been to see the monuments. With that we hopped on the metro to go tour the monuments at dusk. Here are some pretty pictures I took with my new camera!