Norfolk, Virginia
Hoping against hope to avoid a rainout, we cross the Chesapeake Bay to reach Norfolk, Virginia. After lunch in a former church built in 1873, Dad and I visit Nauticus to see the USS Wisconsin and the Hampton Roads Naval Museum. We finish a day of wet sightseeing at the outstanding Chrysler Museum of Art.
The driving directions from Salisbury, Maryland, to Norfolk, Virginia — a two-and-a-half hour trip of more than 130 miles — are pretty straightforward: Take Highway 13 south. That’s it. No decisions to make, no turns to negotiate, no maps to misinterpret.
That will get you across the state line into Virginia, through forested, rural Accomack and Northampton counties; over bridges and into tunnels crossing Chesapeake Bay; through Virginia Beach on the other side and into Norfolk.
As Dad and I drove along the southern end of the Delmarva Peninsula, listening to our podcasts, a perisistent light mist turned to drizzle. We had dodged a rainout the night before with the Delmarva Shorebirds, but there was plenty of precipitation in the forecast for that night’s game with the Norfolk Tides.
The weather worsened as we reached Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States. We had seen the bay on our first day in Annapolis, 150 miles away. More than 150 rivers and streams flow into the Chesapeake’s wide waters, most notably the mighty Susquehanna River, which long ago flooded the plain to form the bay. It took us a good 25 minutes to cross it in the foul weather.
Freemason Abbey
We stopped for lunch in Norwich at Freemason Abbey, built in 1873 by the congregation of the Second Presbyterian Church. The First Church of Christ Scientist took ownership from 1902 to 1948, and from then until 1987 it served as a meeting hall for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, an American offshoot of an oddly named fraternal order that dates back to England in 1730.Freemason Abbey had a Pastrami Reuben on the menu, but i decided to mix it up with the Ultimate Cuban Sandwich: ham, house-smoked pork, and Swiss cheese with pickles and mustard on flatbread. Excellent.
Nauticus
Next we drove down to the waterfront to Nauticus, a science center and museum complex that includes self-guided tours of the USS Wisconsin, a U.S. Navy battleship that first launched in World War II and saw action in the Korean War and the Gulf War of 1991. The rain had just paused, giving us a chance to see the ship before the further inevitable showers returned.In 14 years of active service, the Wisconsin earned six battle stars, five in World War II for its role in the island battles of Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa; and one for the shelling the Japanese home island at the end of the war, anchoring in Tokyo Bay.
“Big Wisky” was designed for 1,804 enlisted men and 117 officers in tight quarters, stowed in a carefully arranged puzzle of men, guns, artillery, missiles, radars, food, and other supplies.
We walked about the deck and gawked at the size and array of the battleship’s many weapons, including its three triple-16-inch (406mm) guns. In the shadow of one of these massive dealers of destruction, a military ceremony took place, warming the wet deck with speeches of praise and gratitude.
Our tour complete, we crossed over to the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, an official museum of the U.S. Navy that interprets 243 years of naval history that took place in and around the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. That history began in 1781 with the Battle of Chesapeake Bay, in which a French fleet led by Rear Admiral François Joseph Paul prevented a British fleet from reinforcing Lieutenant General Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. British and American ships also fought in these strategically critical waters in the War of 1812.
During the Civil War, trade around Hampton Roads was disrupted by the Confederate CSS Florida, a pirate sloop-of-war disguised as a foreign vessel that captured 37 prizes on the seas. The bay was also the site of the first-ever engagement of ironclad warships, the 1862 Battle of Hampton Roads, in which the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia fought to a draw over the Union’s blockade of Norfolk and Richmond.
Chrysler Museum of Art
The rain had picked back up again as we pulled up next to the Chrysler Museum of Art. The museum was founded in 1933 as the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, but in 1971, automotive heir Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (whose wife was a Norfolk native) donated most of his substantial collection to the museum, which adopted his name.The museum’s collection includes more than 30,000 objects spanning 5,000 years of history and is focused on American and European paintings, sculpture, and glass art.
We started with the glass collection, showing off a multitude of styles and effects across the centuries.
The museum’s extensive holdings include works by Tintoretto, Rubens, Bernini, Manet, Cézanne, Rodin, Gauguin, Matisse, Braque, Hopper, Pollock, Warhol, and many more. We wandered through its galleries, marveling at the masterpieces. Each time we passed a window, I peeked outside to check on the rain — which was only strengthening — then refreshed the Norfolk Tides Twitter account to get the status of our game. It wasn’t looking good.
Gustave Doré, The Neophyte, c. 1866-68
Getting restored: Thomas Cole, The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds, 1833–34
Pierre-August Renoir, The Daughters of Durand-Ruel, 1882
Gustave Jean Jacquet, Girl Minstrel, 1881
By the time we left the Chrysler Museum, the rain had turned into a deluge, flooding a section of the museum’s parking lot. I sprinted to the car in the downpour, picked up Dad at the front of the museum, and resigned myself to missing our first ballpark of the journey.