Mid-Atlantic Vacation Blog

Friday, July 6 - More Wildlife, Crossing More Water, And Heading Toward Home We got a good night's rest and leisurely got on our way out of Ocean City. Still, we got going a little early, so we took the liberty of stopping for breakfast and some house of pancakes (with as many as we've seen since we crossed into Virginia, they all run together, but this one was called Little House of Pancakes, Ribs & Pizza). It does seem a little odd to eat breakfast in a bar, but the food was pretty good. However, we lost 20 minutes of our morning waiting to get our bill (I mean 20 minutes after we finished eating) because the restaurant's computer system crashed and our barely-English-speaking waitress had trouble doing a hand-written bill for us. This gets me to something else I've noticed ever since we've been in tourist areas of Virginia and Maryland regarding the nationalities of many of the restaurant and gift shop workers. Most of them seem to be either Scandinavian or Eastern European/Russian. Those are not nationalities I would normally associate with this part of the country, but from the Dairy Queen at Williamsburg to most of the gift shops in Ocean City, more people sounded Russian than any other nationality. Maybe it is the proximity to Washington D.C.

Anyway, we still decided to venture to Assateague Island National Seashore to walk the two remaining trails (Life of the Woodlands and Life of the Marsh) in hopes of seeing horses. The woodland trail was very scenic, but had little non-biting insect animal life, except at this overlook:
Horse and Bird

We then went to the other trail, and while we didn't get to see any horses, Brooke was very happy to see this:
Cute little turtle

It turned out that there was a variety of wildlife to bee seen, including birds, fish, jellyfish, mussels, crabs, and several turtles hanging out at the side of the water, including these:
Terrapins?

Thanks to the telephoto lens, we were able to get a look at these, because, from a distance, they pretty much look like shiny spots in the sunlight.

One thing I haven't talked about much are the birds, mostly because I have difficulty identifying them and getting good pictures of them. However, watching these birds swoop and glide over the marshes is really cool and gives me the feeling like I'm in the middle of some Wild Kingdom documentary. I got some pictures of birds in flight, but they are so far away that they are either just silhouettes or blurs, but I wanted to share at least one bird picture on the blog:
Definitely a bird

Finally, we realized that we needed to get headed west and toward Hagerstown, Maryland (in the Maryland panhandle) so I took a few pictures like this to capture the coastal scene before we left:
Who knew swamps could be cool?

Even though I worried about our route winding through rural Maryland and Delaware (almost all of Delaware that we saw was farms and fruit stands selling corn, melons, and "lopes"), crossing Chesapeake Bay again, and going through the mess of roads between Baltimore and Washington D.C., we didn't encounter any traffic problems until we got to Frederick, Maryland, well past the major cities. The delays were minor and we made it to Hagerstown and got checked in early enough to have time to visit their outlet mall and have a good dinner.

Tomorrow, we are heading home, but not before we make a side trip to Cincinnati to see a Reds game (and, time permitting, visiting the Jeffersonville Outlet Mall) before finally bringing our trip to a close. Appropriately enough, on the day we go home, the first name of the Reds starting pitcher is Homer.

Click here for the last day's entry.

Blog Archive
Home

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws