I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream...And The Beach!

Tuesday I flew solo for the first time since my surgery while Den took the girls down to Sandbridge. They had an A-MAY-ZING time. The water was really cold, but they managed to get wet anyway. They built Mt. Everest, complete with a Yeti, and a sand turtle. They found some HUGE shells. They saw dolphins playing out in the water. The girls made some new friends from North Carolina, and they loaded up on all the classic Hargis beach foods - Pringles, Star Crunches, and Strawberry Soda. Don't ask me how those became Hargis beach foods, they just did. Den forgot to take a camera down with him, so these are just internet photos so you could see what Sandbridge looks like. We are trying to plan a trip down later in the summer with our whole group of friends here. Hopefully we will find a week we will all be in town.

Monday or Tuesday night, we were watching either the travel channel or the food network and we saw a piece on Doumar's Ice Cream, the birthplace of the waffle cone, which just happens to be in Norfolk! Yesterday, after running a couple of errands, we headed back across the bridge to check it out for ourselves. The girls and I had been to Doumar's before, but this was Den's first trip and the first time for all of us to actually go in. Previously we had just used the drive-in.

Once inside we were privileged to actually get to see Al Doumar himself, at 83 years young, hand making the waffle cones on the original waffle iron that the first waffle cone was made on. Doumar's has been in business for 106 years and Al has been making cones for something like 70 of those years. I tried to get the girls to stand with him and take a picture, but they both had a sudden attack of shyness and wouldn't pose for me.

We all had a different flavor of ice cream - vanilla for Den, butter pecan for Paige, chocolate for Summer, and strawberry for me - on the waffle cones we had just watched Al make. Talk about fresh!

Once Al went home for the day, I was able to talk the girls into at least taking a picture with the machine. Thank goodness for small victories, I guess.