Scuba Diving Debacle, Bingo Cults and Family Time....

I had quite an adventure this weekend. I took Friday off from work and headed down to Virginia Beach to spend time with my mom, sisters and nephew. A few months ago we decided we needed to make a better effort to spend time together. We all get so busy and before we know it, it's Christmas and another year is gone.

The plan this weekend was to hang out, eat, be lazy, eat, be lazy and eat some more and then go scuba diving with my dad on Sunday. On Friday night we went to our favorite restaurant at VA Beach, Roudees on the Inlet. We used to live about a block from there and we've been eating there for about 20 years. This time, I was reminded that it's more nostalgic than anything else but still yummy. Roudees sells the best she crab soup at the beach but we are always on a mission to find better. There is a man working there as a valet, he's been there since I was a little girl, we heard he makes 90K+ a year. lol! I think I went into the wrong field.

Saturday night we thought it would be fun to play bingo. Boy were we wrong! I've known for sometime that there are some fanatical bingo players and this night proved it. There are people there with troll dolls and little "good luck" trinkets. They have every color of bingo markers and some of the markers appear to have glitter in them. I think there could be a place on ETSY for custom bingo marker bags =)
Playing bingo is supposed to be fun. right? We were so stressed out. You get these huge boards with at least 20 different bingo cards on each one. The numbers are called so fast! I usually got through half of the boards before the next number was coming! I did win one bingo but I had to split it with four people. My total take was $16.50. lol.
Overall, it was really fun but a little too fast paced for me and oddly cult-ish. My sister suggested that next time we go to a different bingo place that has computers that do all the work.

On Sunday we had a plan to go scuba diving at Kiptopeke State Park. It was quite an adventure! My dad has been scuba diving since he was in high school. He told us about Kiptopeke and that he used to dive there. We were very excited and started out around 6:00 am, getting all of our dive gear packed up. We pulled his boat all over VA Beach to get air tanks and other necessities for diving.
Kiptopeke is a really unique state park. It's about a mile from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. Roughly 400 yards offshore, a series of concrete ships built by the government during World War II are sunk and remain half submerged in about 25 feet of water. The ships serve as an artificial reef and they attract large fish populations, including saltwater trout, rockfish and flounder.
We took the short boat ride out to the ships and got dressed in our full wet suits, regulators, masks, snorkels, fins etc and fell backwards over the side of the boat. The water was still cold with full wet suits but I adjusted quickly. Within minutes we realized the current was so strong we could barely swim against it and the visibility was less than a foot! Arrgghhh, we were so bummed! We learned later that after it rains, at Kiptopeke, the mud is kicked up at the bottom and the visibility is horrible. So.....no diving for us. We ended up fishing instead.
Next time we are going to go to the Chesapeake light tower. We heard you just tie off to the light tower and go down in between the legs of the tower. Here you can see different types of fish, octopi, star fish and crabs. It's 42 feet deep and the visibility is good.