An “Ausflug” is a German word meaning to fly out or away for brief time. For us, an Ausflug is a weekend trip on which we see the country around our home and take as many Volksmarch walks as we can. Our second Ausflug started on Saturday morning with a Volksmarch in nearby Alexandria, Virginia.

Alexandria is a port city from Colonial times just a short way North of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. It was unseasonably warm that morning (in the high 50s), so we both dressed lightly—I wore my blue walking shorts and a light sweater. We started from a hotel outside downtown Alexandria and walked into the “Old Town” part of the city, which is its main tourist draw. This walk is always held on the weekend that Alexandria has is yearly founding celebration and parade. Even at 8:30 a.m. there were people about in kilts and other costumes, getting ready for the parade. Some folks were leading around Irish wolfhounds, which are really tall, shaggy dogs. We were too early this year for the parade, but have seen it in past years, and it was very nice.

All the folks slowed the walking somewhat, but made it also more interesting. We passed by a garage sale as we looped back to the hotel, and found a Marantz turntable for Martin that looked like it was in good shape. Monika also found a decorative wooden plate from Germany with the phrase “Unser Taglich Brot Gibt Uns Heute” wood-burned on it. For a dollar, it was a steal!

We weren’t so lucky at the checkpoints. Monika didn’t find anything interesting at our first checkpoint, the “She’s Unique” jewelry shop. The second checkpoint was “Little Germany” and she found lots of genuine German things but the prices were sky high. She finally settled on some German chocolate and we walked back to the Start/Finish point to get our books stamped.

Our next port of call was Annapolis, Maryland, which is both the state Capital and the home of the U.S. Naval Academy. Traffic was still light around the Beltway, so the drive to Annapolis was under an hour. This was a year-round event with a self-service Start/Finish box located in a German delicatessen and restaurant. The previous year they had German specialties and decorations, but this year nothing was displayed, possibly because we were so early in December.

We sat down to a late second breakfast around 11:30. We had only eaten a light breakfast before our first walk and had burned that all off. I had French toast and coffee, which was a treat for me, and Monika had potato pancakes. Thus prepared, we walked from the restaurant to the state Capitol building in the middle of downtown Annapolis. There was a very nice display of quilts in the lobby of the Capitol, all of them very well done.

After the Capitol, we wound our way up and down the streets in the old district, which remains a vibrant shopping and restaurant district. Along the way we walked along the very narrow inner harbor, and watched with amazement as a huge, ocean-going catamaran came motoring into the harbor, spun about on its heel, and went motoring back out of the harbor again. They didn’t stop, but they only had a few feet to spare on their turns and it was impressive. I was entranced by a collection of nautical miscellany in a small store right beside the harbor. They had ships models, ships clocks, and lots of maritime junk.

Our trail then led us to the Naval Academy where we looped around the seawall that surrounds the Academy on 3 sides. I was singing sea songs and chanties as we walked along in the sunshine, some English and some German. Fortunately all the midshipmen were at the Army-Navy annual game, so there was only one couple anywhere near us while I was howling, and they only looked back at us once. We found the statue of Tecumseh all decked out with war paint, which is apparently something they do before their important games.

On our way back to the restaurant, we passed yet another line of boutique shops, and one had nice dolls outside for sale. I thought they were cute and talked Monika into looking at them more closely. After much hemming and hawing on her part, I bought her one for Christmas, which made me feel good.

After signing in and stamping our books (extra for the State Capital!), we drove farther East on Route 50 over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge into the eastern shore of Maryland. Then we zigzagged thru the rest of Maryland and into Delaware, arriving in Dover just after sunset, around 5:00 p.m. Finding a hotel took us a while as we first tried near the race track (horse racing and slot machines), where the hotels were over $80 a night, and then finally tried closer to the Air Force base, where the hotels were around $50. I finished the mystery I had brought with, which was really gripping, and we went to bed fairly early. We heard warning sirens once during the evening and once, unfortunately, during the middle of the night, but otherwise we slept well.

Since the complimentary breakfast started at 6:00 a.m., we were up at the crack of dawn. We toasted some bagels and I had some oatmeal, so it was a decent snack if not a real breakfast, at least from my point of view. This enabled us to get to the Start/Finish of the year-round event at a pancake house by a little after seven. We almost couldn’t get around behind the pancake house to the parking lot because a very large flock of ducks was gaggled there. One duck in particular just sat in front of the car and refused to move. It wasn’t because he was asleep, he had his eyes open and was watching us. It felt to me like he just didn’t want to move because he was comfortable there. We ended up carefully cutting the wheel so that we missed him by inches, and he never moved.

We signed up and began our walk right at sunrise. The morning was crystal clear, warm, and beautiful as we started off by walking along the shores of a small lake. We watched the dawn color the sky and the sun start to rise. It was gorgeous.

Dover is a pretty city, rather small for a capital, but Delaware is a small state. We wound thru the town and saw a lot of old, well-kept buildings as well as new government buildings. The major renters in the buildings around the government area were almost all law firms! Go figure!

Our way back took us thru a park where we met some of our duck friends again (or ones very similar—I couldn’t tell). Then we traversed a cemetery where they had anti-vandalism signs offering $500 reward. I found it surprising that such an apparently law-abiding town had trouble with cemetery vandals.

On our return to the pancake house, we ordered brunch and stamped our books while waiting for our meals to arrive. I had very good blueberry pancakes—the blueberries seemed to be fresh and full of hot blueberry juice when I bit down on them. Monika had the eggs and dry toast. We both still felt pretty good (not sore), so we decided to try for a fourth walk that was listed for Lewes, Delaware, which was right on the beach.

So we drove Southwest through absolutely flat fields and towns to the commercial strip that sits just inland from the beach towns that line the coastline here. When we arrived, however, we apparently took the wrong “Route 9” into town and drove all the way to the ferry terminal (ferry to Cap May, New Jersey). We turned around and cut back thru town to find the Union 66 station. We finally found it, but it was closed, and a passerby said it was closed since last summer. We couldn’t find hide nor hair of the Volksmarch box, nor any sign about where they had moved it. We even tried calling the listed contact person, but no answer. Finally we gave up on that walk and drove down the beach to Rehoboth Beach where another Volksmarch was listed.

That one started from the Sands Hotel, right on the beach, which fortunately was open even tho it was off-season. One advantage of being off-season is that all the parking meters had been taken down and we could park for free! The walk consisted of two large loops. The first loop went straight inland thru the town and then curved back to the beach thru a very ritzy subdivision that I never even knew existed there. Unlike the typical beach developments with fairly small lots and houses sized from bungalows to Cape Cods, this section had huge, wooded lots and what appeared to be architect-designed, custom-built large homes. Each one was sited very nicely on its lot and unique in some way.

It was really abnormally warm for December. As we looped back to the beach and boardwalk, I was so hot that I even had to take off my T-shirt! It was a kick to be walking on the beach in the bright sun wearing only my walking shorts in December. As we started along the boardwalk, we noticed right away that there were lots of people around. No one was in the water, but there were some folks also in shorts lying on the sand for all the world like it was summer.

Rehoboth beach is pretty strict in forbidding dogs, bicycles, roller blades, frisbee, and pretty much everything else during the summer season, but since this was off-season we had the entire gamut of these forbidden activities. The bicyclists and roller-bladers were up on the boardwalk with us, while the folks playing paddle-ball and frisbee were down on the beach. The wind was coming off the ocean and was a lot cooler when we were shaded by the buildings on the boardwalk, so I reluctantly put my T-shirt back on.

As we passed by the Sands Hotel, we began the second loop of the walk. That loop ran down the boardwalk almost to its very end and then curved inland to return thru the town. About half of the boardwalk shops were open, including the really good candy store where the main street ends at the boardwalk. I searched the store and even asked a sales clerk, but they didn’t have any fat-free candies. So we just rambled on down the boardwalk, candy-less, and watched the people while hearing the soothing sound of the waves washing up on the beach. That “swush, swush” sound has got to be one of the most relaxing sounds I can imagine.

Our path curled into town along an inlet, and our directions said to look for “Monk Parrots” on top of a power transformer. I wasn’t sure if they were serious or if this was somebody’s idea of humor, kind of like a snipe hunt, so I wasn’t looking particularly intently for these birds. Fortunately Monika was better motivated than I, and she spotted the transformer up on a pole with this absolutely huge nest of twigs on it. I mean that nest was as large as some eagles’ nests I have seen, but it was shaped very differently. Eagles’ nests are rather flat and spread out, which makes sense because an eagle is a large bird with a huge wingspan. This nest was round, almost ball-shaped, and the exit was a hole toward the bottom of the nest. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Even better, sitting about three feet away on a telephone wire was one of the Monk Parrots him- or her-self (I couldn’t tell). This was a modestly colored greenish parrot with a beige breast. We just stood in the middle of the street and stared at this odd combination of nest and bird, stopping traffic. The driver of one car rolled down her window and asked us what we were looking at. When we told her, she looked up to get a glance at the parrot, said “Cool!”, and sped off on her way. We also stopped a policeman driving by, who took it in good humor (but we stepped aside so he could drive on).

While we were there the other parrot came flying out of that hole (somehow), and flew into the branches of a nearby tree. They both emitted these just really odd squawking sounds, which, when I come to think of it, are probably typical for parrots but just not what I expect to hear on the city streets around here.

In any case, the rest of our trail returned to the main drag of Rehoboth along side streets and then turned toward the beach again to return to the Sands Hotel. There were some garishly painted houses/boutiques and a hotel trying to imitate a castle among the usual set of beach-type stores and restaurants. When we got back to the Sands, we saw a couple of the plays of the Redskins game while we were stamping our books in the hotel lobby. We found the local station carrying the game and then listened to what turned out to be a very exciting game as we were driving back thru Delaware and Maryland to our home. Fortunately they won the game, so I could run out and work until dark putting new siding on our shed in a very good mood.