PORTSMOUTH
Stay awhile. Linger a bit. Bide a wee.
The colorful name adorning the municipal golf course has its roots in Scotland. It was there, the story goes, that a young boy started to run away from home.
His mother intervened.
"You had better bide-a-wee," she told him.

Just before dawn on a September day in 1718, Blackbeard the pirate and a few of his men with bad intentions rowed up to Currituck County farmer William Bell. Bell survived a hand-to-hand fight with the pirate but lost his money and brandy. Nowadays, his family name lives on in the island named for him.

The cobblestone streets and river views of the Freemason neighborhood in downtown Norfolk have been a favorite of Norfolk's professionals since Colonial times. The neighborhood emerged in the early 18th century as a suburban retreat for prosperous families. It extended west from Church Street downtown to the Elizabeth River, according to historian H.B. Bagnall.

VIRGINIA BEACH Three centuries ago, long before Kempsville was home to sprawling Virginia Beach suburbs, it was a small river port and the scene of two somewhat obscure incidents in the war for American independence.

Before Jamestown, there was Roanoke on North Carolina's Outer Banks, the storied "Lost Colony" of 117 English men, women and children who sailed for the New World in 1587. The settlement failed, although we don't know why or how. The colonists' governor, John White, left Roanoke Island to fetch supplies from England but could not return for three years.

With its neat collection of family homes, a city golf course and a gated military housing complex, Prosperity Road looks like it's lived up to its name. But until the 1930s, this road, off the busy General Booth corridor not far from the Oceanfront, was more famous for its poorhouse.

A trip to the Eastern Shore community of Capeville reveals a tiny post office, rolling fields and a haunted school. While many folks have visited spots such as Cape Charles, with its shops and restaurants and view of the Chesapeake Bay, they may not have heard of the farming community called Capeville, a place with little to attract the typical tourist.

When many think of America's forays into space, they often think of Kennedy Space Center in Florida or that trouble-shooter of a spot in Texas (Houston, we have a problem).

It's a Virginia Beach bridge, but its namesake was a Norfolk man all the way. He also threw fantastic parties. State Sen. John A. Lesner, a Democrat who represented first Norfolk County then Norfolk City starting in 1908, was a champion for better roads and bridges. For almost two decades, from 1914 to 1932, Lesner also headed the Tidewater Automobile Association.

NORFOLK Families poured into the city by the hundreds looking for jobs during the boom before World War II.