Well here we are on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry waiting for our return trip to Lewes. It is around 2:30 in the afternoon and I’m typing this on my Palm Pilot with the folding keyboard that both fit in my pocket—I’m using that instead of a laptop because we’re on our way back across Delaware Bay and traveling as foot passengers (sans auto), so I had to keep the weight and bulk down. This Ausflug has been packed so far, and we'll see what happens by tomorrow night when we return home!

We were pressed for time when we prepared for this trip because of things we had to do before we left. Monika wanted to get the NVV newsletter done before we left, and we both felt the lawn had to be mowed. The lawn was so neglected that not only had the grass gone to seed but the clover had started to bloom. We decided to mow it before our neighbors excommunicated us from the homeowners association, or would come over and do it themselves which they did once when we let things get too out of hand. So we did the newsletter from 8-9 and immediately afterwards mowed the lawn in about 1/2 an hour of very intense work.

Then we started to pack and since we were in a hurry, we just kind of threw things into the Nissan--since it is a small SUV, you can get away with that if you don't have too much stuff and we didn't since we were just going for the weekend. Monika brought the tent down from the garage attic while I chucked in the folding chairs, new propane stove, collapsible table, air mattress, cots, sleeping bags, and miscellaneous equipment. Then we took a "klapkisten" (collapsible box), threw some foodstuffs into it, and squeezed it and a box of water bottles into the Nissan.

In a hurry to get on the road, we did a quick mental check of the major items and drove off down I66 and around the Beltway to Route 50, and thence across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The drive over the Bay Bridge was uneventful, and we started to decompress a little bit by the time we stopped at the YMCA in Easton, MD, to take our first Volksmarch of the trip. The lady at the front desk was friendly and advised us on places to eat lunch in the central part of Easton.

The Easton VM routes you thru the historic district which has a plethora of antique stores! However, we were hungry and were looking for two places recommended by the lady at the YMCA, "The Kitchen" and the "Coffee House East". Fortunately the VM went right past both places! The Kitchen looked very nice and homey but was filled with local customers and we couldn't find a place to sit. Reluctantly we continued on and fortunately found a space table at the Coffee House East. This was a combination of a coffeehouse and a health-food cafe. All the sandwiches were named after their favorite dogs, so that might give you an idea of the ambiance (somewhat crunchy). I had the "Prince of Thieves" grilled tuna which was excellent and Monika had the "Texas Ranger" containing ham and brie with raspberry sauce on home-baked bread. Both sandwiches came, of course, with bean sprouts but they also had artistically arranged sauce scattered on the plate in a Japanese fashion, or at least it reminds me of what I see on the "Iron Chef" episodes. Thus reinforced we continued by walking from the historic district to a rails-to-trails segment that crossed the entire town heading west. The trail also extended to the east as a gravel trail and I was curious how far east that part of that trail went since it looked like a nice hiker/biker trail.

Crossing to the other side of Easton, we walked another small loop on the far side of town where we saw concrete abutments that were either a line terminus or bridge for the old railroad. We returned with a kind of a “loop within a loop” that showed us another part of the historic district before we returned to the YMCA. We thought the town was very neat, clean, and interesting--no shacks or dilapidated housing anyplace we went. The town boasts a 60-member choral arts society and a renovated or carefully preserved “Avalon Theater” looked art deco period to me. It is now used for community theatre, chamber music, and other miscellaneous cultural and commercial events. It’s nice to see that type of re-use of classic buildings, and the events would give more variety to life in Easton.

Cape Henlopen
We returned to route 404 and drove across rural Maryland and Delaware to the town of Lewes and the adjacent Cape Henlopen State Park. Since it was threatening rain, we were lucky enough to find that they had campsites available for both nights even tho it was around 5 pm. We were thankful that the rain held off while we set up the tent and cooked dinner. Our first surprise was that we had the wrong tent, but fortunately the one Monika had grabbed wasn't too old and had all the pieces in the bag. That of course made us think about all the other things we might have forgotten using the old, unreliable mental checklist.

It turned out to be quite a list, including flashlights, matches, washcloth, paper towel, camera film, band aids, garbage bags, and cooking spray. So after dinner we went shopping to get those items plus some missing food like milk, eggs, salt, pancake mix, and ice which we had also forgotten. It's a good thing we weren't out in the wilderness!

I spotted a Dollar Store as we were filling the car, and we purchased everything there except the foodstuffs, which saved us a bit. Then we found a Giant for the food and packed it all back to the campsite. The rain held off while we returned to the campsite and walked out to see the ocean from our campsite. One of the WWII observation towers was right next to our campsite and we walked over to the dunes beside the ocean. It was starting to get dark, so we turned back before too long and headed back a different route thru some scrub pine forest. The microclimate is so dry in this area that I saw a lot of cactus plants growing wild along the road.

The rain held off until I tempted fate by trying to start a campfire, which must be a similar principle to washing your car to cause it to rain. I had also forgotten our ax and had to use larger pieces of kindling wood for the fire, which I knew were going to be hard to light. I thought I had it licked by using lots of tinder and pieces of cardboard under the 1 x 2s, and it had just started to catch when the rain finally came. The fire sputtered and slowly died, so we decided to turn in for the night.

It rained cats and dogs thruout the entire night, punctuated by bursts of wind that shook the tent. There was nothing to worry about, but I wasn't used to the noise and woke up for each burst of rain or wind. Monika had these problems plus a drip from the ceiling over her, so she got an even worse night’s sleep. By morning, I was in "husband debt" and considering the ploy of going out for breakfast at a restaurant, but the rain stopped and we decided to try out our new grill for the Coleman stove.

I cooked pancakes and fried eggs, and then boiled water for coffee and hard-boiled the last 4 eggs so they would keep better. We were very happy that all of our new equipment was working perfectly except the spark ignition on one burner of the stove. I also learned that PAM cooking spray is in fact flammable when I re-spayed the hot griddle before cooking the eggs. The instant flambe was very impressive but I wasn't singed and just became a little more careful with the spray. After breakfast we drove over to the ferry parking lot, bought pedestrian-only tickets, and went for the first cruise of the day.

A Tale of Two Cities and Two Centuries
The ferry ride over to Cape May was so exciting that we didn’t sit down during the entire trip, which was a little over an hour. First we ran up and down the stairways to see what was on each deck, and then we settled on an open balcony about 3 levels up at the bow of the ship. This gave us a good vantage point for pictures and, as it turned out, for spotting pods of porpoises (dolphins?) that crossed the ship’s path. That happened several times and we were also buzzed, of course, by the normal squadron of seagulls as we rolled along in a slight swell. I powered up my GPS and found that we were going about 12 knots most of the time, but with almost no relative wind because we had a tailwind of about the same speed. The GPS said we were headed toward Villas rather than Cape May, but I later found the town of Villas on the map just where the GPS said it was (near the ferry berth on the New Jersey side).

We took the shuttle into town and were glad we had paid the fare because it was about a 3 mile trip, and we would have been awfully tired had we walked it. The shuttle let us off at the railroad station (a special train goes to the zoo), which was also an information center where we got some maps and asked for the quickest way the starting point, the Queen’s Hotel. Fortunately, it was only about 3 blocks away, so we trotted on down and signed up for the walk.

The Cape May Volksmarch first zigzagged thru the historic area of the town where a lot of the old Victorian houses had been restored and converted to Bed and Breakfasts. A lot of them were built around 1869-1870 during the town’s heyday as a resort community for the people from Philadelphia. One block in particular had a row of identical Victorians except for all different paint schemes in various bright colors. The total effect was very pretty. I was going “Gee look at that” to myself a lot during the first part of the walk as we saw one big, colorful house after another—one of the nicest collections of restored Victorians I have seen in our travels. And every one of those bread and breakfasts had a no vacancy sign out front!

The one project we saw that was still in progress but quite impressive nonetheless was the conversion of “Congress Hall” to a shopping mall right in the center of town. What building used to be, I don’t know, but it was quite old and absolutely huge, extending an L-shape with each wing being 1 block long and 4 stories high. The place was in sad shape, which most of the columns supporting the porch roof being replaced and I saw several places where the roof was rotted thru that would also need to be replaced, of course. It will be a lot of work but I expect the end result will be spectacular.

The zigzagging of our trail ended at one end of the promenade along the beach, and we next walked the length of the promenade, about 1.4 miles with a great view of the town to the left and the beach and Delaware Bay to the right. The promenade was a wide concrete sidewalk--I was disappointed to not have a boardwalk, but walking the promenade gave us a good insight into the character of the town.

The town was geared for older visitors, definitely not teen-agers. We only saw 2 small T-shirt shops and 2 subdued and rather pathetic-looking arcades with almost no one in them. There was no sign of wax museums, fudge emporiums, or other teen-oriented businesses. The shuttle driver later told us that the town had tried appealing to teenagers for about 3 years in the 60s, but found that they didn’t spend the money like the older crowd and so they reversed course and kept the attractions low-key after that. The result is a very well-preserved 19th century resort community ambiance.

The high point of the promenade was a community center which was currently hosting an arts and crafts show, where we spent a couple of minutes. What we thought was unusual for a beach town was that you had to pay to get onto the beach and wear a tag—every entrance had a person guarding it who made sure no one would sneak onto the beach without paying. This reminded me of beaches in Germany which use the pay system but I do not think it is a common thing in the U.S. and definitely don’t prefer it. The fee-based beach may be one more reason the town doesn’t appeal to teenagers, however.

The promenade formed the first leg of a very large triangle which finished up this Volksmarch. The second leg was straight north thru a middle-class subdivision with newer but more modest tract-like homes. This seemed to be the area where many of the town citizens actually lived. The third leg of the triangle was straight back down Washington Street to the center of town and a 3-block pedestrian mall. The mall had many interesting boutiques, being particularly heavy on the antiques, and also had a few places to eat. By this time it was around 1 pm, so we were quite hungry and altho the Pilot House restaurant had been recommended by our shuttle driver, we couldn’t hold out any longer and stopped in a corner deli serving lunches for grilled chicken (Bob) and a hamburger (Monika).

We returned to the shuttle terminal right after lunch but had just missed one, so we had ½ an hour to kill. We decided to visit the street side “Strawberry Festival” along Perry Street about 5 blocks from the station. Monika was drawn to a stand with hand-made dolls and found a Raggedy-Ann and Andy like pair of dolls that we both liked, so they came with as we hot-footed it back to the station to catch the next bus. The shuttle driver told us that there was an equally exciting and impressive “Lima Bean Festival” in the fall which featured different recipes for lima bean soup and brought people in from miles around—I don’t think he was kidding.

Since it was Saturday, they had a special ferry at 2:20 that left soon after we embarked. I settled in the forward salon to start writing while Monika scanned the seas. She jumped up and ran to the railing whenever she spotted dolphins (porpoises?), with the net effect of getting a sunburn. Since the wind was now directly in our face and kept us cool and it was still cloudy/hazy, neither of us thought of sun block and we both got burned.

Once back in Lewes, we decided we had enough time to drive to Ocean City, do a second year-round-event, get a bite to eat, and get back the tent by sundown. The 34 mile drive down the coast consisted of stretches of intensive strip development complete with a visual clutter of signs, interspersed with two very nice park areas that had kept the natural dunes and beaches. This gave us a peculiar study in contrasts between the natural and the artificial. The natural scenery was far more relaxing visually and usually easier driving. All in all the drive took a little under an hour, in part due to all the stoplights in Ocean City, which has a main drag that seems to go on forever.

The Ocean City Volksmarch is an in-and-out from the Convention Hall to the boardwalk and along the boardwalk South to the amusement center at the end and back again. What a contrast to Cape May!! Ocean City was chock-a-block with high rise hotels and condos instead of Victorian bed and breakfasts, and to top it off it was Seniors Week and we were surrounded by high school seniors instead of little old lady seniors. But the wooden boardwalk was easier on our feet than pavement and the beach was free, which were definite plusses. I found that you had to watch out for the jeeps pulling the passenger trams down the center of the boardwalk. Fortunately the drivers had special sound effects that they could play to warn pedestrians of their approach.

The amusement park at the end is large, tacky, and noisy, but the teenagers seemed to like it. Arcades along the boardwalk were similarly loud and the T-shirt shops were crowded with customers. We usually do this walk in the winter when most shops are closed, and now we know why! Ocean City is almost a caricature of a 20th century beach town catering to younger folks.

On the way down we scouted for dinner places on our return and settled on Haduks on the Board, a hole-in-the-wall place that had gyro sandwiches at reasonable prices and did NOT serve beer. A similar place two doors down served beer with the predictable result that two teenagers with 5 empty bottles of beer were sitting at a table next the boardwalk and yelling at people who were walking by. We had chicken gyros and a good rest that gave us enough energy to finish the walk. We did enjoy the sights of the beach such as the variety of kites flying outside the Kite Loft and the wood play structures for the kids that were scattered at the southern end of the beach.

Driving back into the campground, we enjoyed the sunset but were chased by threatening clouds and had premonitions of another rainy night. However, we made it to the campground before it started to rain and before it was really dark, so we brushed our teeth and jumped into the tent just as the first raindrops started to fall. To our relief, the rain was only a few minutes and afterwards were both had a nice night’s sleep—the new air mattress was nice for sleeping altho hard to get up from and down onto—we’re not as flexible as we used to be. The sky was clear and the moon was shining bright enough that we didn’t need flashlights. A whip-or-will kept me up for a while with a continuous stream of calls. If he had always made the same call, I could have adapted to it as background sounds and gone right to sleep, but he kept putting variety into the calls. He mixed in “whip-or-whip” calls with the “whip-or-will”, and occasionally he ended his call with a kind of hiccup, so it sounded like “whip-or-will-hic”. This kept my attention and made me think about what kind of evolutionary pressures would make a bird sing at night rather than during the day, and why the bird would have those variations on his theme? Did he get bored singing the same old thing? Was there a rather tough worm in his little inside? I finally gave up the fruitless speculation and drifted off to sleep.

The Last Day
Morning dawned bright and sunny, which was a pleasant change. The tent was still wet, so we arranged things to dry and walked over to the concrete observation tower which was right next to our campsite. The climb to the top was quite a few steps since the thing is about 100 feet tall, but the view was well worth the effort. The signs at the bottom confirmed my suspicion that these towers were part of the WWII coastal defense system. The top levels were arranged for viewing a 180-degree arc of the coastline for several miles out to sea. In contrast, the lowest level and one level in between had what looked like archer slits in a medieval castle wall. We finally decided that those were in fact firing slots that would have been used to defend the tower in case of an invasion, which fortunately never happened. We learned that over 400 ships had been lost off the east coast during the war due to enemy action, mainly submarines, and I couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret for so many lost young lives.

We took some pictures of the panorama before returning to ground level to walk over toward the ocean. We walked thru an abandoned part of the old military base with aging buildings and, surprisingly, a small-bore cannon that seemed to be preserved and in working order. Pieces of a larger cannon were also scattered about, which made me wonder if they were going to make an exhibit about the old base. The short trail ended in an observation point complete with an old bunker. The sky was cerulean blue, the sun was sparkling off the waves, a cool wind was blowing off the ocean, and the view was magnificent.

The view made me remember about when we had visited Cape Henlopen with our boys, which Monika estimated was about 20 years back. We had been camping then too, of course, both out of preference and out of necessity (not having enough money to do anything else), and we all had a whale of a time. The boys were young, about 6 and 8, and energetic, so camping and the beach were just perfect for them.

We recalled seeing this tower from the beach and even walking south on the strand to see if we could get over to it, but we never got far enough to actually reach it (and I recall the area was still the military base at that time), so it was nice that we finally had an opportunity to explore it.

We both remembered the campground at that time as being much farther north and nearer to the beach than the current campground. Monika remembered going the bathhouse to change into our swimsuits. The boys were old enough that this was the first time we decided that I would take charge of them on the Men’s side rather than going with her. So I helped two squirmy, wriggly boys put on their swimsuits while she reveled in the unexpected luxury of having a few moments of calmness to herself while she changed. She recalls thinking to herself at that time that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that she had the two boys because if we had girls she would have been helping them change!

I remembered playing in the surf at the beach, which was quite strong. One of my students had mentioned the sport of “body surfing” and described how you do it, and I decided to try it. Judson, Martin, and Monika, of course, were right in there with me and we all had fun trying to ride the surf in to shore. I made the mistake, however, of keeping my facemask on to keep out the salt water. I realized the mistake when I was pitched head over heels as the wave carrying me broke onshore and the mask was ripped off my head. Being more stubborn than smart, I persisted in wearing the mask until finally I tried walking straight into the side of a large, green comber as it was peaking and curling over onto me. The wave hit me with such force that the glass of the mask shattered. Fortunately I closed my eyes by reflex as the water rushed in and did not get any glass in my eyes or, surprisingly, any cuts on my face. So the mask was hors de combat, but we all played in the surf for a while before walking down the beach to warm up and look for seashells (very few, as I recall) and saw the tower in the distance. It was very nice to get the family memories back from the past.

Monika and I retraced our steps to the campground and found that the tent had dried completely, which made packing it a LOT easier. There are few things I like less than packing a wet tent full of sand. I lifted up the back end of the tent to make the sand we had tracked inside fall toward the doorway, and Monika stood in the doorway and scooped it out. This effectively removed the sand from the tent, but at the expense of getting the sand all over Monika and in her hair! The air mattress was also dry by now and folding easily into its sack. Monika was so happy that all our new equipment like the stove, table, and air mattress, had come with their own sacks or carrying cases. The Coleman stove case even has two special pockets for propane bottles! This all made loading the car a cinch, and we were off for the day shortly before 10. As we left Lewes and crossed a bridge over the canal, we saw a pair of bald eagles soaring a little above us and quite close, which was the first time we had seen eagles so clearly since Alaska.

Our plan for the final day was to travel leisurely back across the Delmarva and hit a weekend Volksmarch event on Kent Island. Since they were starting the Volksmarch until 1 pm, we were in no hurry and could enjoy the drive thru picturesque little towns, past the notorious traffic circle at Georgetown, and along the bucolic countryside. We found out that driving thru Denton was about the same time as driving the bypass around it, at least in light traffic, but more interesting. We also stopped at a roadside stand and bought nectarines and tomatoes to eat on the way, and asparagus for dinner.

The Kent Island Volksmarch was set in a little park at the edge of the island next to the beginning of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. The first 5 km had a wonderful variety of ecological environments. We followed a wide crushed-shell path past a duck pond complete with duck blind, a stretch of seashore with beaches, a lagoon with egrets fishing at the edges, deep, shady old growth forest, and a section of new growth forest with the sunlight streaming down between the saplings and sparkling off the white crushed shells. We paused back at the start/finish to have our cards stamped and decided to each have a bratwurst with sauerkraut to energize us for the final 5 km.

The final 5 km were for us less interesting than the first half. We did have a moment of excitement when a lady in the group ahead of us screamed and jumped back on the trail from walking in the grass. We hurried up to see what was happening and found a very shaken lady and a very puzzled looking black snake about 5 feet off the trail. The snake was holding his head up, but wasn’t coiled or anything, so I went up and took a close-up shot of him (her? Hard to tell). It posed nicely for me while I was taking the picture and we went on our merry way. Our energy started flagging during the remaining section of the walk, which was basically a loop thru the town of Stephensville (nice little town and restaurant) and the industrial park (boring). Monika felt we were also tired because it was our 4th walk in 3 days, but in any event we were happy to get it over with, get our books stamped, and crawl back into the car for the drive home. The drive back was surprisingly quick and uneventful (low traffic), so we got back home around 3:15. That gave us plenty of time to do laundry, fix the asparagus for dinner, and write in the trip journal before turning in for the night and finishing the latest mystery we were reading together. It had a happy ending, so we could go to sleep in good cheer after a wonderful weekend. Even the memories of rain on the tent were soothing in retrospect.