Midwest/East coast trip, day 13

Day 13: Cruising around Hampton and Norfolk/second of several non-flying days

We get a guided tour of Norfolk Naval base as airplane partner's niece is in the Navy. Said airplane partner is a Navy veteran and was stationed at Norfolk many moons ago. The USS Eisenhower was in port and the best part of the day was that we managed to get a tour. As the Eisenhower was pretty close to deploying, there were a fair amount of crew aboard and lots of activity. The best part of the tour was going up to the flight deck. We were able to walk maybe half the deck before a master chief gave us the boot. It turned out that some NJP or Non Judicial Punishment activity was going on. A whole bunch of folks were at Captain's Mast and I guess the Navy figured a half dozen civilians walking around overhearing things wasn't a good idea. Not that I was listening all that much mind you. I was way too busy imagining what the flight deck would look like when flight operations were in progress.

Left the camera behind for the tour of the base. The only thing I missed was a couple of E2s in the pattern.

After the tour of the Navy base, we hit the Naval Museum in downtown Norfolk. The best part of the museum is being able to walk out onto the USS Wisconsin battle ship.

The least fun part of the day was dealing with the repair shop as I had to sort through bad sell phone connections and some confusion on my end in order to understand what the shop had done and what was/wasn't working. In the end, the airplane will be fixed by the end of the day but in talking to our regular A&P, it sounds like we may have an issue with a portion of our gear auto extend system (which we thought had been disabled...at least it functions as though it's disabled per Piper's recommendation).