Saturday, October 30th, 1999.
The Delmarva peninsula is the peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean which has the state of Delaware, and parts of Maryland and Virginia, hence "Delmarva". It's supposed to be a pretty area, but we also know that it is more than a 2-hour drive from Fairfax. So when we found that there were going to be Volksmarches in several different cities on the Delmarva peninsula for this weekend, we decided to make it the first Ausflug of the fall. Hooray for the new Ausflug season!

We were both pretty tired by the end of the week, so we decided to get a good night sleep on Friday night and and leave early Saturday morning. We managed to get out of the house by about seven o'clock, but we needed money and gas so we had to stop at the Shell station and the ATM. We finally got out of town about 730 a.m. and started to drive into the rising sun. We drove south around the Beltway and took route 50 to Annapolis, where we crossed Chesapeake Bay on the very large bay bridge. Monika had been driving up to the bridge, but she was spooked by the large suspension bridge, so she stopped and I took over driving the next hour or so.

It was very pretty driving in Maryland because all the trees were turning their fall colors, and the countryside was clothed in yellows, reds, browns and greens. Along the Seashore in Maryland we encountered fog, particularly in the low-lying areas. The fog was thick enough that I had to slow down a little bit, but we still made good enough time to arrive in Berlin Maryland after about 2 1/2 hours of driving. By that time the fog had burned off and the rest of the day was a brilliantly clear cloudless blue sky.

The Volksmarch in Berlin started in Stephen Decatur Park. I guess that Stephen Decatur was a hometown boy for this little town. From the Park, we looped around to the south and came back to the central business district, such as it was. This was a very small town, I would estimate fewer than 5,000 people, and main business was a Purdue chicken packing plant! (In fact, that was one of our checkpoints!) It was a very quiet and clean town, nothing at all like the beach resort of Ocean City which was just down the road.

We were warned to look for a place to stay overnight rather earlier than later because there were other events taking place in Ocean City that day and places to stay might have gotten scarce later that night. But we were so hungry that we stopped at an Arby's and had lunch before cruising up and down the single Main St. of Ocean City to look for a place to stay. A Hampton Inn caught our fancy because they always have such a nice free breakfast buffet, and they had a reasonably good rate (59 dollars). So we booked our room, took the luggage up stairs, changed our shoes and socks, and then drove to the Best Western hotel for the start box for the year-round walk.

We were still pretty gung ho after eating and resting for an hour, so we decided to take the 12 km loop. Ocean City is a very long, narrow City (about six blocks wide) which is situated on a barrier island or peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and a bay. The 12 km loop zigzaged across the peninsula so that we saw nice views of the bay as well as the Boardwalk and beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The farthest point of the walk was the inlet between the Atlantic Ocean and a bay that had been cut by hurricane somewhere around the 1930s. There we saw a life-saving Museum and a sculpture representing Native American Indians that was carved out a large tree trunk.

The way back was essentially straight up the Boardwalk from one end to the other. The first thing on the Boardwalk was a small amusement park which was closed for the season. Despite that, there was a surprisingly large crowd of people along that segment of the Boardwalk. Possibly a lot of people had come because of the beautiful day -- sunshine and temperatures in the '70s. We ambled along as we were getting pretty tired by this point. We finally stopped to buy a half vanilla and half chocolate soft ice cream cone that we shared. About two-thirds of the shops were open, and and they were mostly pretty tacky -- T-shirt shops, tattoo parlors, body piercing, arcades, and all kinds of food stores.

It was too cold for anyone to be in swimming except for the surfboarders who were wearing wet suits. Most of the people were on the Boardwalk, and a few were lying on the beach. One person had launched a huge kite, which I thought was really colorful. I was surprised that a kite that large would fly in a breeze which seemed to be less than five miles an hour, but it did and was remarkably stable. We saw two policeman mounted on horses which surprised me a little bit, but Monika pointed out that the horses could effectively run on the beach which even the bicycle policeman could not do. Open air trams pulled by little tractors traversed the Boardwalk at regular intervals, but we didn't take one as that would've been cheating.

At the end of the Boardwalk we were both pretty tired and I felt like I had some blisters coming on, so we stopped and rested for while on a bench. We listened to the surf breaking on the beach, which was pretty quiet and gentle since the waves were very small. I had a blister on my small toe and right on the bottom of my foot. After I had bandaged them up and we had rested for a while, we set off on the last couple of kilometers back to the car. I limped up to the room, and we sat out on the balcony and had coffee while we ate some (low-fat) chocolate cookies. For dinner, we hobbled over to the Dough Roller restaurant directly across the street. They served pancakes anytime in the day, and that's exactly what I felt like so that's what I ordered. Monika had a chicken taco salad, but she was too tired to eat it all, so I had half of that also. When we got back to the hotel room, we collapsed into bed and just had enough energy to read a book for little while before going to sleep.

Sunday, October 31st, 1999.
We had planned to walk (in my case limp) over to the beach to try to get pictures of the morning Sunrise, but heavy morning fog canceled that plan. We did, however, take advantage of the Hampton Inn complimentary breakfast. I've found that's one way I can still get a low-fat breakfast while we're on the road, which is otherwise almost impossible to do at a restaurant. We shifted all our clocks to standard time, which gave us an extra our for a leisurely breakfast and drive up to Rehobeth Beach for our first Volksmarch of the day.

Monika drove so that I could do my rubber-necking. Beach towns like Ocean City always seemed to have a wide variety of different styles of houses and weird, offbeat things to look at. There were some respite from the wall-to-wall development along the drive. In this case, the beach towns of Ocean City on the south end of the peninsula and Rehobeth and Bethany beaches on the north end of the peninsula are separated by state parks that preserve some of the beaches in a natural state. It was nice to see the sand dunes because they reminded me of the Indiana dunes park on the south side Lake Michigan that I remembered from my childhood.

The first town after the park was Bethany beach, which impressed us as being a town full of snobs. The homes were beautiful and cars were nice, but the people didn't seem very friendly. Every single road that lead into the town was labeled something to the effect of, "Private Drive, No Beach Access". It was pretty clear that they didn't want any visitors Intruding on " their" beach. The sign at the edge of town advertised it as "The Quiet Resort", but we thought they should change the sign to say something like, "No Beach Access Resort", or "We Don't like Your Kind around Here, so Why Don't You Just Move on" resort. The fog slowed us up some during the early part of our drive, but we arrived in Rehobeth beach shortly after the scheduled start of the walk at 8:00 a.m..

We started the walk from the Sands hotel which was directly on the beach. The "Webfooters" Volksmarch club had set up the registration table right in front of the hotel where you could not miss it. They were friendly folks, and we signed up for the walk and the commemorative patch. It was already warm enough that I changed to shorts by unzipping the legs of my pants (you would have to see this to believe it). Throwing the legs of the pants back into the car, we set out on the first part of a walk which was a loop through the northern part of Rehobeth beach.

Rehobeth beach is an old, middle-class type of resort, which puts it kind of in between Ocean City on the one hand and Bethany beach on the other. The homes varied from being old beach bungalows to rather large, modern homes. Some were brightly painted, which would look garish in anything other than a beach community. In particular, I thought that one house that had whales and dolphins painted on its side was quite striking.

Some kind of a five or 10 km "fun" race happened to be going on at the same time we were walking through the northern part of town. Our trails came together just as a large pack of runners and walkers were beginning the race. In these races the serious runners usually are up in front followed by people just doing it for fun and then young kids and families in the rear. But in this one we saw some extra unusual folks. One woman was dressed as the Cat in the Hat, and another couple of guys were dressed in Halloween costumes. That gave our walk some excitement, but we turned off and headed south for the beach to continue on our trail.

The Boardwalk at Rehobeth beach is much smaller than the Boardwalk at Ocean City, but it is also a lot less tacky. In particular, there was no amusement park at Rehobeth's Boardwalk, which I thought was just as well. Monika suggested that we would walk on the beach itself and this turned out to be a great idea. The tide was ebbing, which left a large, firm area of wet sand to walk on between the waves and the rest of the beach. That type of wet sand is firm but soft when you walk on it, very easy on the feet. We had a wonderful time walking hand-in-hand along the beach because it was a pretty day with a blue sky and bright sunshine, and it reminded us of many other pleasant beach walks. We didn't, however, find any shells, which is our usual excuse for walking along the beach.

We turned in from the beach to make our final loop through the town near the south end of the Boardwalk. We were anxious to see if the monk parrots were still in their nest beside a lagoon, and much to our delight they were! This time we had brought Monika's camera with which has the zoom lens, and we managed to take some close up pictures of them. In particular they obliged us by sitting in the sunlight on some telephone wires, and we got a couple of clear pictures that showed their colors.

At our final checkpoint, we talked with a German member of the club who we had met on the C & O Canal walks. She and the other club members we had met on those walks looked very healthy, but she mentioned that the nice guy who had driven them out to those walks had since died of cancer. We remembered him as a jolly fellow with a great sense of humor, and gave her our sympathy.

We looped back around the southern section of the city to the main street. When we saw a bakery we just had to stop in. Breakfast was "but a memory" by this time, as my mom used to say, and I was famished. While I put on my shirt (it was so warm I was going shirtless), Monika made a sensible decision in bought some fresh-baked Italian bread. I made a non-sensible decision and impulsively bought a cinnamon twist. I ate the cinnamon twist in a few seconds, and then we shared the fresh loaf of bread as we wound around some side streets. When we returned to the main drag, we found that they had a Halloween festival of some kind in the parking area at the end of the street right next to the beach. There were various demonstrations of arts and crafts, and food! When I saw some freshly roasted peanuts I couldn't resist and bought a pound of those. They were still hot from roasting, and tasted wonderful! We munched and crunched on the peanuts while we walked back to the Sands hotel. After getting our books stamped, we chatted briefly with some of the club members before we decided to try drive up to Cape Lewes and do the Volksmarch there.

The drive up to Cape Lewes was nice, and we managed to find the police station without any problem, but we couldn't raise anyone inside. "Ah hah!" I thought myself, "now is the perfect time to use our new cell phone!" We took the cell phone out of Monika's purse, turned it on, and found the area code in a Volksmarch book. The cell phone worked perfectly, but unfortunately no one answered! We waited a few minutes and tried again, but had no luck. Standing around a police station for another couple of hours didn't seem very attractive and we were both getting hungry, so we bagged the Cape Lewes Volksmarch and drove back out of town. That was the second time we try to take that Volksmarch and been totally frustrated -- the last time we had gone to the gas station which should have had the start box, only to find that it was closed down completely with no messages about where the Volksmarch box was or any contact information. I think we will give this Volksmarch one more try, but if we can do it then it's "three strikes and you're out".

We had lunch at an Arby's that was just outside of town. Sitting down with our maps, we looked over the possibilities and found that the year-round Volksmarch in Cambridge was kind of on our way back, so we decided to try to take that one. Getting to Cambridge require that we drove diagonally south West from Cape Lewes to the other side of the Delmarva Peninsula. The land was very rural, mostly flat with an occasional small swale due to a river drainage basin or similar feature. There was very little traffic -- it was, after all, Sunday noon, and a drive took us about an hour. Coincidentally enough, we arrived at the YMCA in Cambridge right as they were opening at 1 p.m. -- timing is everything!

Retrieving the Volksmarch box from a bored-looking attendant, we filled out the paperwork and took the directions for our walk. Cambridge's right on the Chop Tank River, and our first loop led directly from the YMCA to a park on the south side of the river. From there we walked along the riverside westward toward Chesapeake Bay was very nice views out across the water. There are many fancy homes looking out across water, and one mansion surrounded by an estate. Some of the homes, however, were distinctly middle-class in appearance. One of these middle-class homes was the residence of Annie Oakley in her retirement.

We curled back from the shore of Chesapeake Bay to the center of the old town using what could be considered a main street. There was, however, almost no traffic in this sleepy little town so we could've walked in the middle of the street, which we occasionally do when we walk on side streets. Our landmark for this part of the walk was a genuine, old-fashioned ice cream parlor. Since it was Sunday, it was closed for the day, but I enjoyed looking in and seeing the old soda fountain and the shiny red vinyl stools. I'd like to come back sometime during the summer and have a banana split or a root beer float at that soda fountain.

Our walk continued for another mile or so almost up to the bridge over the Chop Tank River. They had information about the town at a little kiosk on our route, so I grabbed some of the brochures and read them while we walked. Apparently, the town citizens had constructed a Skip Jack type of fishing boat in the 1980s which was used for chartered excursions. It should have been docked down at the riverside, but I could not find it when we walked past the marina. There were a lot of beautiful sailboats at the marina, however, so that made up for it. It might be fun, though, to take a sailing trip on an old-fashioned Skip Jack, especially on warm summer day.

We were both getting pretty tired by this point. We took a breather at a nice picnic bench that was set under a couple of trees and had cooling shade. I took off my shoes and socks and put bandages on my blisters while Monika had a drink of water and watched the boats sail by. Afterwards, we struggled back to the YMCA and paid for our walk, stamped our books, and fell into the car for the drive home. We were so tired that we forgot Monika’s Volksmarching hat, which has many pins that have come from our travels. It’s actually hard to miss because it is a vivid, fire-engine red baseball-type cap with Charging Charlie, our club’s mascot, emblazoned on the front along with an outline of the State of Virginia. It took us a while to get it back, but the folks at the YMCA had put it aside after they found it and mailed it back to us shortly after Christmas. That made Monika very happy, because she had her “hammer” pin back which was a commemorative pin for doing the U.S. Customs Y2K conversion so effectively.

Outside of running into the traffic coming from Redskins football game on the way back home, the drive back was uneventful, which was good because we were pretty tired. But it had been a really nice change of pace and we were very relaxed, even if somewhat footsore, at the end of the weekend.