Pablo Averbuj

Anniversary Weekend

This weekend was our first wedding anniversary and we celebrated on the beach. Leigha’s mom volunteered to watch Anna for the weekend, so we accepted her offer to spend some time by ourselves. We explored the options, we considered New York City, but there was too much to do in too little time. Instead we decided to go to Virginia Beach. Ideally it would be quiet and uncrowded and low-key. Saturday morning we did some last minute packing, loaded up the convertible and hit the road around 9am. We were in no rush to get there so we stopped and had lunch along the way. We checked into the hotel around 2 or 3pm and went to explore the beach.

We weren’t sure how warm the water would be so we took bathing suits in case we decided to do some swimming. We dipped our toes and decided it just was too cold to be worth it, so instead we walked down the boardwalk to see what was going on. Leigha had been there before so she mostly knew what to expect. It turned out they were having an end-of-summer party – Netptune Festival – and this was the culminating weekend. There were live bands and fair food and many interesting activities. We watched a sponsored flag football game on the beach (with referees and everything), looked at the vendor crafts and listened to some live bands.

We walked back to the hotel to unpack and we ate some dinner. After dinner we headed back out to the beach to see the fireworks show that was part of the festival. The weather had turned quite chilly and I hadn’t packed anything approximating warm. I only had shorts, flip flops, and some short sleeve shirts. We huddled behind a stack of folded beach chairs to protect ourselves from the killer wind, listened to more music, watched the fireworks and then headed back to the hotel.

Now it turns out we had brought the top part of our wedding cake with us. It was still frozen when we unpacked so we had left it out in the room to finish thawing. When we got back to the room it was fully thawed so I got some plates and utensils from the restaurants and we ate the cake I’d been dying to eat for a year. I won’t lie to you, it was OK. We (I) ate about a quarter of the cake, we had a few more bites in the morning and we threw the rest out, which seemed like a shame, but age was not going to make it taste better.

After we checked out of the hotel we drove to the other end of the boardwalk where they were having sandcastle competition. The sandcastles were amazingly cool. Especially impressive were the “solo” division. A single person had made, in the span of a workday, an really cool artistic sculpture that wouldn’t last the month, if it even survived the week. I would have loved to have taken some pictures of the sculptures but I had left my camera on overnight which left the battery discharged.

We ate a lazy breakfast on the beach, loaded back into the car and headed home. Along the way we enjoyed the warm sunshine, sang along to our favorite songs and got home in time to put out beautiful daughter to bed. It’s hard to be disappointed with that kind of a weekend.