Tuesday – Leavin Day again
After 50 miles of standard-issue inter-urban interstate I was able to escape onto US 158 east, and I was back to the backroads, which constitutes my Happy Zone on these trips.
Soon the land flattened out and became cotton fields again. Roadside ditches became roadside sloughs, because it the water table looks like it’s 6 inches below to road level. One think that I have learned on this trip is that the cypress swamp zone is a lot more widespread over the south than I thought. Not just Florida. The Bootheel of Missouri (before they drained it), Tennessee across the river, a huge chunk of southern Georgia and northern Florida, and now the northeast corner of North Carolina. I’m headed for the Great Dismal Swamp!
WHUFU page for: Merchants Millpond Campground
A quiet little loop of campsites right off US 158.
The rest of the park - Visitors Center, access to the Millpond, trails - are a couple of miles to the west then south. Very pleasant place.
tonight:
I got here late and left early-ish, so I did not hike or avail myself of any of the other wonders of the place. Very peaceful though...
I am not happy with not getting to my camping spot until dark. I am not adjusting to the earlier sunset. I blame it on getting out of rhythm with all this visiting. I fall into my preferred habit of staying up late and sleeping late … and this is the result.
Anyway, here I am at the oddly named Merchant’s Millpond State Park Campground. When I pulled in there was a sign saying drive back to the Visitors Center to register. I figure the VisCen is closed, and it will be completely dark after the four mile round trip, so I go ahead and park and settle in.
Blog awhile. It’s windless and buggy, so it seems like a perfect time to crank up the citronella candle. I’m not sure it does any good, but it feels cool to burn a big ole candle on a still night. Eventually I retired to the van, and around 7:30 a ranger shows to to give me a hard time about not registering. At first she was going to make me follow her back to the Vis Cen right now, but she relented and copied my driver’s license # and all my info as a way of encouraging me to drop by and settle up tomorrow. I can’t escape now! :)
Wednesday (Oct 17)
I did drop by the Vis Cen to pay my tab. It’s only $12 due to my senior-hood. That’s not too bad. A helpful sign tells me that the Merchant’s Millpond swamp is NOT part of the Great Dismal Swamp. There is a little ridge in between, so they are in different watersheds. Whatever, it’s all swamp to me.
Back on US 158 along the bottom of the Great Dismal, then take a left and follow the west edge north on US 11. I haven’t had phone reception since yesterday, so I am running a little blind with regard to COFFEE!
About 20 miles along on 158 I zoom past what looked like a restaurant. It was called the Raleigh Cafe. I get just enough phone reception right here, so I pulled over at the first place I could and determine that this is as good as it’s going to get for quite a few miles. I execute a sketchy K turn, backing into the driveway I’m in and creating a small traffic hazard in the process. But out here folks deal with huge farm machines in the road, so a dumbass tourist van doesn’t upset the locals on the highway. It does seem to upset the locals whose driveway you’re pulled into, but that can’t be helped. It was a good meal! I’m still in the grits zone, which is great by me, I love grits.
158 intersects US 11. Drive north on 11 for a while, soon the Great Dismal Information Center comes up on the right. Very interesting place. When I got out of the car, it was quite disorienting to see the tall masts of a half dozen or so sailboats behind the VisCen. WTF?!
It all made perfect sense when I found out that the Dismal Swamp Canal, paid for by merchants and dug by hired slave labor, is now the alternate route of the Intracoastal Waterway. Like I say, very interesting place. There is another Visitors Center across the canal for the Great Dismal State Park. I had absent-mindedly watched a truck cross the little bridge over the canal, so I thought one could drive to the state park. Not so! It’s a pedestrians only for all but official vehicles. It opens “on demand” for boats on the canal. A third of it raises up, and the other 2/3 rotates. As an aside, when the bridge master goes home for the day, she opens it up for the evening. This made perfect sense as soon as she said it – the default state of the canal should be open.
Sailing the Inland Waterway is a bucket list item I will probably not accomplish … although I have driven along a lot of it.
I followed the road next to the canal for quite a few miles as preferable to big, ugly US 11, but eventually I had to rejoin it.
Even though I am fed and caffeinated, I want to stop somewhere on this side of the bridge for wifi and just to enjoy the area a little more. I ended up navigating to the beach part of Virginia Beach. It looked scenic on the map. It was not scenic, it was super crowded, high-rise urban beach, like Palm Beach Florida – yuck. You almost never saw the actual ocean, it was hidden either by high rises or endless privacy walls for gated communities. Nonetheless I frond a nice coffeeshop – very expensive, $7.94 for an americano and a scone. As befitting a beach hangout, the barrista was the beach babe of every coffee shop nerd’s dreams. Their kitchen was closed, but she recommended a sandwich place that was very good!
The Chesepeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (CBBT) is an engineering marvel. The stats: “17.6 miles long … more than 12 miles of low-level trestle, two 1-mile tunnels, two bridges, almost 2 miles of causeway, four manmade islands and 5-1/2 miles of approach roads, totaling 23 miles. The tunnels so the big ships bound for Baltimore Harbor or the gigantic Naval base at Norfolk can pass. The restaurant at the mouth of the first tunnel is closed, which is disappointing, because I loved the stop there to enjoy the whole thing withiout driving the last time I did this in 2010. Toll = $13.00.
The very first left after the bridge is the short road to:
WHUFU page for: Kiptopeke State Park Campground
Expensive for the non-resident, but a nice campground in a spectacular location, on the Chesapeake Bay just a few miles north of where it meets the Atlantic.
There is a cool little boardwalk access to the beach, where you can walk along the beach to the boat ramp/picnic area/fishing pier a little south.
Really fun place.
tonight:
The tent site loop is closed for the season, so I camped in a hookup spot without using the hook ups. The bathroom is heated!
The campground is very nice. Big, level sites in an open field. But the Chesapeake Bay is the star here. There is a nice trail out of the back of the campground that runs in the forest along the bay for a mile or two. Early on is a side trail to the amphitheater, which has a little boardwalk that takes you over the dunes and down to the beach. I got there at a perfect time with the pink sunset rays were reflecting off the water into the trees. It’s very exciting to me to think that we are just a couple of miles from where the bay meets the ocean. Walk along the beach a couple of hundred yards to the left to the boat ramp, and then the fishing pier.
It was a beautiful night and it was all just perfect. The unexpectedly interesting thing is the breakwater a few hundred yards out in the bay. It appears to be sunken barges. It was an ever so scenic accent to the sunset on the still water.
The breakwater is WW 2 concrete ships! Apparently steel was so scarce that we built a fleet of them. Nine were sunk right here to make a breakwater for the Kiptopeke Ferry, which was put out of business by the Bridge I just crossed. What an interesting story!
I walked back up the road and found a staircase that I was very proud to manage without turning on my flashlight. Whoopee! I am at the corner of the campground.
Thursday – Saturday
I did not use their nice shower because I will be at a real house tonight. So I just battened down the van and headed out. I took a driving tour of the shore area to see what it looked like in the daylight. Still pretty cool. You could see details of the breakwater barges in the daylight. A couple of white fellas had caught a bunch of big tasty-looking fish which I am sad to say I cannot remember what. There was another coast trail on the south side of the pier that I missed in the dark last night. Too bad, I would have entertianed myself my stumbling along it in the dark if I’d seen if.
Then it’s time to head towards the gate to take my medicine. There was nobody at the gate. I made a good faith effort, got out peered in the window .. nobody. I got the heck outta there,
Nice drive on US 13 up the spine of the Delmarva peninsula. There was relatively nearby coffee in the town of Cape Charles, off the highway on the bayside. I probably shoulda done, because it looked like a historic, interesting little town, but I wasn’t feelin it and pressed on to coffee in the town of Olney MD. Crossroads Coffee, nice place right at a main corner of downtown, it was in a converted bank building. Say a lot about your economy when the local banks become coffee shops.
The smart way to go is to stay on 13 to 113 all the way to Rehoboth, but for old times sake I took a right on good ole US 50 (yes, the same one that is the Loneliest Highway in Nevada and goes through Carson City and South Lake Tahoe) to follow it to its eastern terminus in Ocean City MD. Ocean City has gotten pretty huge – miles of 12 story hotels along the beach side, seafood restaurants and tee shirt shops and such on the other side.
Along with just seeing the sights I want to take a nostalgic look at the little A frame we owned here in 1977-81. Back when I was a rising star at the Census Bureau with a house in the city and a house on the beach! I did this in 2002, and maybe on other time, but this time I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s been too long and I couldn’t even find our street, but I’ll bet somebody put up a nicer house. It wouldn’t be real hard to be nicer that that old place.
Drove over the beautiful bridge over Indian River Bay, and I’m in Rehoboth!
I got there a little before they did, so there was a little confusion, but it all worked out. I had never met Peggy’s brother Mark before. Very nice guy.
We went out early to a super awesome happy hour dinner at Bluecoast Seafood – Happy hour oysters $1, little neck clams $.50. Mark had a dozen oysters. Peggy had a half-dozen. I had to be different and got 4 oysters and 10 clams. I was pretty happy with that.
Tonight’s dinner special is crab cakes – normally $32, on special for $19. Peggy eats in a different league than me. But it was all very, very good.
Friday
Tonight we are on schedule for another fancy meal with a neighbor down the street. It again was a pretty fancy Friday night to me (and I imagine to her brother) but to them it’s just what you do when you go out. My $28 fried chicken was good, but it was just chicken, not $28 worth of good. The neighbor like his steak, but the rest of us weren’t impressed with our meals..
Saturday
Culture day! The local Film Society is showing of a production King Lear from England. The big deal about is that Ian McKellen is playing Lear and it may be his last theater role. There are a couple of gruesome parts that I didn’t dig, but overall it was pretty cool. I get annoyed with some of the tragedies because everybody is an idiot. In the first scene, all Cordelia had to do was say a couple of nice things and the whole bloody mess could have been avoided. Maybe I’m not cut out for high-end theater. I should stick to my detective stories.
We ate out with more of her beach posse again. Apparently nobody cooks when they go to Rehoboth. They go out every night and and spend $30/40 on dinner. It was at least a very good dinner this time. A place called Michy’s in an un-promising highway shopping mall. It is one of the hot new local places, so it was hoppin on Saturday evening. But with good reason, everybody’s food looked great. My scallops were quite tasty.