USS Theodore Roosevelt (Rough Rider)

A fairly quiet morning due to late nights so there was a lot of sofa and relaxed consideration.
But in the afternoon he announced that we were taking advantage of the excellent weather and doing a bike ride. Jof decided to come too, even when she found out it was to Gosport.
So we gathered our stuff and cycled to the Gosport ferry and emigrated. Jof is always amazed at how big the Gosport peninsula is, and some of it is almost nice.
We took the southerly section of the old decommissioned railway down past Workhouse Lake where they have a tidal lake and a dammed bit, and down over Stoke Lake where we stopped to admire the view. As it was an old railway, there's a decent iron bridge with massive rivets, a waterfall and an egret who padded about in the fast-flowing water trying to stab fish.
Past the rather impressive Crescent, we broke out into the greensward of Stokes Bay and met half the world who had had the same idea. We parked up and noticed a submarine hiding and several suspicious ripples in the open water, and a lot of giant colourful kites and a lady spinning green whizzy-things on strings like you get at new age festivals.
I was just throwing some stones into the sea when the insanely large aircraft carrier hove into view off Portsmouth point (Pom. P. on navigation maps, hence Pompey). This little chap (100,000 tons) is the USS Theodore Roosevelt which is so big it can't fit into Portsmouth Harbour, so had to drop anchor in Stokes Bay, which is why we were there. You could see right through it where they had helicopters.

Many tugs and vessels busied themselves around it and we had ice cream and Jof got tea, and ham and cheese toastie sandwiches and we all looked at the carrier. The beach was quite busy and many blokes had those giant zoom lenses that have to have their own suitcase but I didn't care because I had a double choc ice cream.
The deck is 4 1/2 acres in size. That's enough to grow a couple of thousand apple trees but they use it to store lots of fighter planes.
But soon enough we were cold, because it's still March and it gets blowy on the seafront so we got back on the bikes and went home as quickly as we could to get back to the kind nurturing sofa with its comfortable seats and endless chocolate.
Incidentally, the journey was 9 1/2 miles, Jof and I cycled, Bud ran it and still had to stop and wait for me to catch up.
Pompey has always been a Navy town and back in the day when we had a Navy, the arrival of a ship into port was a big occasion because there would be hordes of thirsty Matlows (sailors, from the French Matelot) looking for beer and fights, and lots of young ladies in challenging skirts from all over the country would travel down in the hope of meeting some of them and hearing how lonely they get on board so everybody was happy.
The USS Theo Roosevelt contains 5,000 sailors who will get 5 day's shore leave. That's an awful lot of seamen for the young ladies to cope with.