May 12– Visiting a Friend

Today Isaac and I hope woke up at the edge of a Wal-mart parking lot in Norfolk, North Carolina. We had made plans the night before to hang out with a friend that was staying on base at Virginia. After stopping to spruce up a bit, we started the hour drive to where she, Michelle, was staying.
It was about 10:30 when we found the Air Force base. Before we went in, Isaac had to get out of the car because the base checked every persons ID and Isaac didn’t have one. I continued in, found Michelle's house and picked her up. After we got back outside of the base, we picked up Isaac and began driving around trying to find something to do. After about half an hour we decided that bowling might be fun, but having found out that the “Sparetimes” nearby didn’t open until noon, we decided to go shopping.
First, we realized that Michelle was wearing flip-flops and thus had no socks so we went to the local Dollar General and bought a pair of tiny girls socks. We wondered for a little, pretty much following Michelle to wherever it was that she was going. Eventually we walked by the cookie isle and some Double-Stuffed Oreos caught Michelle’s eye. We bought this and some ice and then we were off.
We waited in the parking lot of the bowling alley for a few minutes until it opened. Eventually it did and I got us all two games and a pair of shoes. Bowling was fun, I don’t remember the exact scores but I, of course, won all of the games. Isaac and Michelle, in their jealousy, were making fun of my perfect form the whole time we were bowling, but it was okay because I won (I’m just kidding, my form is far from perfect). After two games Isaac still hadn’t broke 100 so he decided that we should play another game. Isaac didn’t manage to break 100 on the following game but we decided that we were done.
After driving around a little bit more, we found a local mini-golf course that we thought might be fun. After quite a bit of miscommunication in trying to find it we finally called them and got more accurate directions and eventually pulled into the parking lot. They had a deal of $7 for unlimited play, so all three of us got that. There were three different courses, a yellow, a blue, and a red course, so we decided to play a round on each.
After playing the first round normally enough (the course wasn’t exceptional, in fact, it was basically just some fake grass with metal pieces placed randomly throughout), we decided to play the following two rounds in whatever weird ways we could think of. We made shots with our eyes closed, using only our knees or elbows, standing on only one leg. We never kept score but I’m pretty sure tiger woods would have had a hard time beating us.
After these three games it about almost four and Michelle needed to get home so we found the route on my phone and made our way back. We dropped Isaac off at the grassy hill before entering the base. We both said goodbye to Michelle (though at different times) and I dropped her off at her home away from home (she actually lives in Utah).
After picking up Isaac (reluctantly) we decided to continue our drive to Richmond, where one of my relatives was willing to let us stay. The drive was about two hours and nothing particularly incredible happened. We arrived at the pleasant house of my dad’s cousin, Rhonda, in Richmond and after calling her to make sure we were at the right place we grabbed our stuff and moved in.
Rhonda opened up her entire upstairs to us, which has a king sized bed and a twin (I claimed the King), for us to sleep on. She also gave us some pizza for dinner which I thought was really good. After eating, the three of us discussed things to do in Richmond and then realized that the weather was going to be rainy for the next week, so we would be limited to things that are inside.

Interesting Observations:
Playing mini-golf is pretty fun but adding extra difficulties to it definitely makes it interesting. We played one round shooting the ball billiards style using the golf club as the stick. That one took awhile to finish.
Virginia birds don’t seem to know the unspoken rule of the road. We’ll let you eat the food we leave around if you get out of the way when we’re driving. I almost hit a couple birds that flew right in front of my car as I was driving.
Pizza is good, in every way, shape and form. I really liked the pizza Rhonda gave us, but I hadn’t had any like it before. The crust was really flat and it didn’t have a whole lot of sauce but it had so many toppings that it tasted great. In fact, I think I’ll have some now.