Horses, Marshes, Bridges and Tunnels

Evenin' Campers!

Greetings from the Old Dominion State... Virginia... we've been carried back to the Southland... a sure sign we are heading home one state at a time.

We started the day in Maryland on Assateague Island. When I left you last night we had seen precisely one horse (Assateague is famous for its wild horses which roam completely free around all parts of the island) and zero mosquitoes (which, according to legend outnumber the horses by about 10 million to 1). That all changed today. Mrs. C' slept in a bit while I rose before the chickens. The eastern sky was just barely showing its glow along the horizon. Venus was rising and the sky was so clear that the light of Venus was enough to read by (maybe... I didn't actually try). I don't normally put pics here that belong on the cutting room floor, but tonight I'll make an exception. I stepped outside to take some time exposures of the sky to share with you. One problem: I don't have a tripod with me. I used the picnic table as a brace and voila! Blurry pics. Here's the best of them anyway....

That's Venus at the top and the horizon formed by the dunes behind the trailer. This is literally the view from our door at dawn today, at least if you need glasses and didn't have them on.

Anyway... the horses and mosquitoes. Before I stepped out to take that I was hoping that a quiet dawn might bring horses to the campground and as an early riser I might be the one to see them. What a coup! Then I saw the dawn arriving, stepped outside to take that pic (and several others that were longer exposures and technically even worse) and discovered that dawn doesn't bring horses to Assateague campgrounds... it brings MOSQUITOES! For the next 45 minutes in the trailer I scratched more often than someone who found a pile of unchecked lottery cards. Evidently, mosquitoes are either very quick to find an entrance or stick to one's clothing and skin (using their needle beaks, no doubt) and piggy-back on the humans they encounter. In either case, there were a bunch in the trailer after my photo expedition that were not there before. I tracked down a few and dispatched them in splots that looked like they came from Jackson Pollock's "red period". I am certain it was O-negative given the welts and scratching on my exposed skin. After that I lost all interest in sunrise photography for the day and if a wild horse came up to the trailer I would have said "Get the hell out of here and take your damn mosquitoes with you!!!!!". Fortunately for me, no horses arrived and the sunrise was unspectacular so I didn't have to test my resolve to keep the Airstream between me and the enemy.

Mrs. C' rose, we had our coffee, read and enjoyed flapjacks from the galley stove with raspberries. For some reason I do the most elaborate cooking when we have the least sophisticated campsites. Without electricity to power the microwave or toaster (unless I fire up the generators which was out of the question given that they were surrounded by mosquitoes) I can't simply microwave something from the fridge... I have to use pots, pans and open flame. Breakfast was hot and fulfilling. Checkout time was 11:00 so we planned to slip out under the wire and not much earlier. While I was walking the dogs I spotted my quarry... wild horses... in the camping loop next to us about a hundred yards from our camp site. I returned the dogs to the safety of the trailer. The material given to us by the National Park Service ranger (I knew they were official from their forest green and khaki uniforms, the patches on their sleeves and most of all the hats they stole from Smokey the Bear) told us that the horses are dangerous and nobody should approach one within 100' or they would be cited and fined for "harassing a wild beast of some sort" (that's probably not the full name of the crime in the US Criminal Code... but I lost the flyer so I'm working from memory). Anyway I grabbed the camera with both lenses and headed back to Camping Loop A. There they were... two of them... they were beautiful specimens of horseflesh. Here, let me show you....

These two horses were grazing right next to a campsite where a man and woman were attempting to hitch a travel trailer to a Jeep. They were loud as she shouted commands to guide his back-up. "Another foot! A little to the left! Two more inches!" I believed they were unaware of the presence of these two horses or the fact that they were within the 100' perimeter and therefore this woman's shouts of guidance put her in legal jeopardy of an imminent "beast harassment" charge. Suddenly, she shrieked! A third horse had come up behind her and if it didn't actually touch her, it got close enough to startle her significantly. In response to this commotion (the Jeep moving... the barking of orders and the shriek) the three horses did... NOTHING. They acted as if they live in a parallel universe which we can see clearly while their view is all grass to graze on. Now, I'm not saying the guys and gals with the Smokey the Bear thing are exaggerating the danger these animals represent. They are large... and untamed... and in close contact with people. I'm guessing some jack-ass from New Jersey decided to show his 10 year old twins how he used to earn as living as a Hollywood stunt man doing stand-ins in Western films and got himself kicked in the gonads precipitating the brochures and addition of the beast harassment line to the criminal code. But these three horses on this particular morning could easily have been waiting for their turn to take 4 year-olds on a lap of the pony ring at the county fair anywhere in America. Later in the morning we saw more horses even closer to our campsite. Cool stuff.

By 11 we were off... pressing south... to First Landing State Park in Norfolk. Today's drive took us down the Delmarva peninsula which sits like an arrowhead pointed south with the Chesapeake to the west and the Atlantic to the east. As we moved south, the land mass on the GPS got progressively narrower. By 12:30 we decided to stop for lunch. We picked a place that sounded interesting and took a detour off US 13 to get there. We wound up at the Island House Restaurant on the Wachapreague Channel in Wachapreague, Virginia. At this point on the coast, the last solid land is several miles from the beach and ocean which are essentially a series of narrow sand bars off the coast. Wachapreague is that last solid land. We sat on a balcony of the restaurant right on the channel and here is the view we enjoyed over our midday meal:

If you want to see precisely where we were, here's a Google link. If you don't usually use "satellite view" with Google maps, turn it on for this and you can see the very table we sat at with that spectacular marsh to the east. Google Map -- Island House Restaurant. Oh... the food didn't live up to the view, but if you are ever in Wachapareeague (which is best pronounced by talking with your mouth full) go there just for the view. Actually, that's the only restaurant in that little town, so go there to avoid starvation... and take in the view as food for the soul.

We pressed on... south... toward a point of interest that I was really looking forward to seeing...The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. This amazing structure inclides one arch bridge, three extensive roadways constructed on piers 25' or so above the water and two tunnel segments each of which is about a mile long. It spans over 17 miles shore-to-shore connecting the far southern end of the Delmarva penninsula with Norfolk, Virginia. Literally when you are on this roadway the Chesapeake is on one side and the open Atlantic ocean on the other. It was clear today but in even the slightest haze or fog a traveler on this bridge would be out of sight of land. It's hard to photograph from a moving vehicle. Pics abound on the internet if you want a birds eye view of the bridge/tunnel. However, here is a pic I took of just one tunnel and its pier-supported approaches from the beach near our camping spot (which is only 4 miles from the Norfolk end of the bridge/tunnel:

Those two bumps are the tunnel entrance and exit. That panorama is 5 separate pictures pieced together. I could see the entire bridge/tunnel from where I took the above pic even though the other end was 17 miles away. I photographed the entire bridge which was over 30 separate pics. I elected to just show you the one section above. As we passed through the tube in the picture above about two hours or so before I took this pic a 600' long container ship passed over us. Here is a pic of the moments before we dropped into that tunnel with the ship straight ahead and over the tunnel segment:

So, we arrived at First Landing. This park is so-named because in 1607, the shipload (read that carefully...  it refers to the quantity of people who fit on a sailing ship... not a random large number) of people from England who would come to be known as the Jamestown colonists first dropped anchor here, at Cape Henry in what is now Virginia at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.We are camped in the far corner of this park. Here's another Google Map link showing our precise camp site: First Landing State Park site C10

Here is a panorama I took from the beach about 1/4 mile from the campsite. It shows the beach as it is now.... which is likely what those first English colonists saw as they set foot on North America for the first time 408 years ago.

As I walked back to the trailer for dinner I had a rare opportunity. I don't carry gear for wildlife photography and I don't get much practice, but with limited skill and tools I snapped this: 

A lone Bald Eagle soaring over the place where English colonists first set foot on what is now the US. Ok... so eagles are not a British symbol and the people who came here would never hear of "the United States of America" plus many of thier countrymen in red coats would give their lives in an effort to prevent the birth of the US anyway...  but let me enjoy the moment of symbolism which was presented to me however mixed it is.

Tomorrow for a time we abandon roads and bridges and take the SilverCliche' to sea on the North Carolina ferry system. I understand that we may or may not have internet for the next two nights while on Ocracoke Island. if we do I'll post an update tomorrow and Monday. If not, expect more on Tuesday night when we'll be nack on the mainland and near Camp Lejeune (Oorah!)

SC'