First Landing State Park

We're back from a week in Virginia, on the tippy-coastal end of the Chesapeake Bay, where it meets the Atlantic. This is the spot the Virginia colonists first landed when they founded Jamestown in 1607. Now it's a lovely state park with nice little CCC cabins from the 1930s, a sandy beach, and lots of nice hikes through varied terrain. The downside: it's an oasis of nature amid the vast, new strip malls and boulevards of Virginia Beach. I wonder what this area looked like only 30 years ago-- my guess is, pretty rural. (It's changed.) Furthermore, there are about a zillion Navy bases in the area. Our last evening we witnessed a battleship exercise down the beach featuring helicopters taking off and landing on the ship, whirring overhead, circling, and repeating, sometimes dangling guys beneath them. The park ranger said they had been jumping out with parachutes earlier, but we didn't see that. The massive Navy presence meant that the region seemed to be populated by SuperBeings. Normally, when we go out on a nature trail it's pretty deserted. But here there were super-fit people running and biking everywhere. It was un-American! Where were all the fat people?

The landscape was beautiful-- very southern, with hanging Spanish moss, and amazing cypress swamps. You'd think they'd be swarming with mosquitoes, but no. The ecosystem is in balance, and the mosquitoes and their larvae are eaten by other critters in the water. We swam and dug and saw lots of marine life-- horseshoe crabs, blue crabs, ghost crabs, hermit crabs, pelicans, dolphins swimming out to sea in the morning and into the bay in the evening. At the same time, there were always at least three and sometimes nine giant cargo ships parked in the bay just off the coast. Nature and human culture coexist there. I can see why the Chesapeake is so precious and so endangered.