That's right, SilverCliche' has made it back to the shores of the mighty Atlantic. We last gazed upon her silvery waves as we pulled out of Vero Beach a little over two weeks ago. Today we saw her again as we crossed onto Assatague Island, Maryland. More on that later... first an update on where we've been and what we've been doing.
When last I posted we were in Frederick, Maryland visiting the grands... well, visiting the three that we can't visit near home in Florida. We saw high school marching band practice, made 'smores, ate ice cream, practiced reading and writing (with the first grader...), ate at a BBQ place near them and generally had a good visit. During the two days we were there we hung with our daughter. She and Mrs. C' checked out consignment shops from Bethesda to Thurmont while I did trailer maintenance or crosswords. If you've followed along with me you know we went to Houston's in Bethesda. I highly recommend the French dip.
We stayed at a campground owned and operated by the Montgomery County Parks and Recreation department in Clarksburg, MD. It's called Little Bennett Regional Park. We stayed there last year, too. It's well wooded and isolated. Campsites have electricity but not water hookups. No worries... with judicious use of water and restricting ourselves to "navy showers" (turn on water; wet; turn off water; lather, shampoo, scrub, etc.; turn on water; rinse) we can easily go three days with our onboard supplies. Little Bennett is a bit creepy. Both times we've stayed there I've suspected that some of our camping neighbors actually live there and their campers might be incapable of ever hitting the road again. I was reading postings on the Airstream Forums recently. A newcomer asked the long-time members for advice on how to select campgrounds. One old timer said "don't ever stay at a campground that offers spaces on an annual rate". Good advice! Little Bennett isn't there yet and as a public facility it probably won't ever be... but I'll keep checking to make sure. One of our camping neighbors was walking down the street one morning and asked me for directions to the shower building. I told him I didn't know... we live onboard and don't use campground facilities... but together we used my camp map to figure out which way he should be going (which was the opposite of the way he headed). I told Mrs. C' about him and said he was an old guy who looked a lot like Hal Holbrook when he played Mark Twain. The next day driving to our site I noticed that the camper in his spot had a sign on the side that read "An evening with Mark Twain". You never know who you will meet in a campground among the travelers, outdoors types and near homeless. We set out to see America and we are sure doing it! I helped Mark Twain find the bath house.
Did we see interesting places, you ask? Indeed. The city of Frederick, MD undertook a plan to spruce up the center of town a few years back... even before we moved there in 2005. It's all finished now including some adjacent commercial and residential space right downtown. The centerpiece is Carroll Creek which now flows in a channel surrounded by shops, dining and a pedestrian promenade. Here, take a look...
Nice, eh? Fredrick is loaded with pre-Civil War homes and shops throughout the downtown district. It was cross crossed by both armies through the Civil War. It now hosts a macabre attraction that is trapped somewhere between medieval and modern times with a dash of torture history... The Museum of Civil War Medicine. As creepy as it is historically significant.
Thurmont is another interesting place and somewhat more creepy even than Frederick. It sits north of Frederick near the Maryland/Pennsylvania border. It, too was well trodden in the Civil War and it has that mid-Atlantic, brick-and-clapboard look too, but on a small scale with the old Main Street being just a couple of blocks. It's claim to fame today is that it is the closest town to the Presidential retreat at Camp David and it has been the site of the headquarters of the Ku Klux Clan. What a country!
So, this morning we said goodbye to Frederick and Montgomery Counties... places where we lived for a total of 18 years... and started our journey south back to Florida. Mrs. C' and I both felt sadness to be leaving our grand kids and our daughter. We felt no sadness to be leaving the rush-rush-rush of suburban Washington. Just to make sure never forgot about that, we left the campground and headed down I270 and across the Beltway. These are roads we had the misfortune to travel regularly... even daily... when we lived and worked in the area. If you have not been introduced, I-270 begins as a 4 lane interstate spur heading from Frederick south-southeast toward Washington. As it snakes along the rolling hills of Frederick and Montgomery counties it swells... eventually becoming a 12 lane behemoth then splitting in two sections to disgorge the cars and trucks (and occasional Airstream!) onto the Capital Beltway in the clockwise and counterclockwise directions. If I-270 was a river, it would be the Mississippi, starting modestly in the far reaches and becoming an unstoppable force of moving mass at its mouth. Except it isn't a river and at two times of the day it is entirely stoppable. The morning (southbound) and evening (northbound) rush hours have grown over the years. I predict that at some point soon they will merge to become continuous gridlock in at least one direction or the other. I believe it will be on a Friday in November a year or three from now at about 12:40 PM when the clog from the morning commute southbound will not have cleared as the glut of cars trying to beat the rush home will halt the flow of traffic northbound. Driving around Washington makes Civil War Medicine look sophisticated and civilized. We were happy to make it through and be on our way east and south.
The ride to Assateague was pleasant. We headed east from the beltway and passed through the capital of Maryland... Annapolis. It's a beautiful little city on the Chesapeake which also hosts the US Naval Academy. Maryland was first settled in areas around the Bay in the 1630s. It's old. The Maryland flag features an image of the statehouse (in which George Washington resigned his commission as the commanding general of the revolutionary army) and several legislators drawing blood from a single taxpayer... ok... that's not actually true... but only because Lord Baltimore's niece wasn't as good a seamstress as Betsy Ross... Maryland has a log history of governmental bloodletting which is another reason Mrs. C' and I left for Florida and took our 401(k) with us! The trip across the Bay Bridge is a notorious affair for Marylanders. It is at its worst on Friday afternoons in the summer as throngs head to the beaches at Ocean City, MD and Rehoboth Beach, DE, both of which are accessed by that bridge. That escape route lives in vacationer's infamy with the likes of the Bourne Bridge in Massachusetts which tortures travelers attempting to reach Cape Cod from Boston. We made it across with ease at noon on a Friday after Labor Day. I have never been so fond of compulsory public education!
Drivers Eye View starting up the Bay Bridge
The land over the bridge is known as the Maryland Eastern Shore. It sits along with parts of Delaware (ok... all of Delaware... the state is too small to be thought of as having parts) and Virginia on a piece of land known as the Delmarva peninsula. Del-Mar-Va... Get it? I think a government committee must have named that. I can hear the discussion "the people of the great state of Maryland think we should call this land 'Maryvirgdela'" "nay, nay say th people of Virginia... It shall be 'Virgindelmar' ". It's sad that the Delaware proposal was the best available... but it could have been much, much worse. The Eastern Shore and Delmarva are historic, quaint (except the part we were on which looked like US1 anywhere between Maine and Florida even though we weren't on US1) and a big agricultural area. At the end of our route was Assateague Island.
Assateague is south of Ocean City Maryland and includes the point where the Atlantic coast of Maryland meets the Atlantic coast of Virginia. We are north of that junction and camped at the Assateague National Seashore which is part of the US National Park Service. Assateague is noted for its wildlife. Most significantly wild horses and mosquitoes. So far we have seen only one wild horse and no mosquitoes. We know the horses are around because we see pile of hoses s... er... ah.... droppings everywhere in the campground and on the beach. We are dry camping (no electric or water... just an asphalt pad on the beach). The campsite is 100' from the dunes and the dunes are 100' from the surf. We can't see the water from the trailer, but we can see the surf. Here are two pics taken from the same spot. One looking east toward the silvery ocean and one looking west toward our silvery home on wheels.
I'll finish off with a shot of a snow fence (or maybe a sand fence) completely buried except for the to 6". This was taken between the dunes and our campsite...
So, tomorrow we head north for a few miles to get back off Assateague (we can't travel the length of the island southbound because the Virginia section is a wildlife refuge and pets are not permitted even in transit). The we head south across the Chesapeake bay bridge tunnel and will camp near Norfolk at First Landing State Park. I'll know and write more about that tomorrow, but I'm thinking that is the sight of... well... the first landing of colonists in Virginia.
SC'
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