Oh my gosh, I slept so much better last night, snug and cozy in the Teardrop, while the kids were safe and protected in the van. I woke up once in the middle of the night and stuck my head out of the trailer to make sure the tent was still there. It was.
I woke up again around 6 a.m. to the sound of a squeal outside. My first thought, of course, was that the kids were pummeling each other in the van. I peeked outside to discover that it wasn’t my children having a little dispute, but two horses in the next campsite, rearing up and swatting at each other with their front hooves. Just like it is with the kids, one horse seemed to lose interest in needling the other and walked away, and the discord ended as quickly as it began.
The wind was still strong this morning. But on the plus side, the stiff breeze has been keeping the man-size mosquitoes away, for the most part. So that’s a good thing. The only escape from the gale is to sit inside the tent and endure the jet-engine roar as the fly flaps around. Or, we can sit in the car. Or, we can find refuge in the potty -- kind of. The only restroom facilities on this campground loop are two pit toilets, each housed in its own fiberglass hut. I don’t understand the physics of it all, but somehow the wind finds its way up through the toilet seat from the pits... Keith just censored my next sentence. You fill in the blanks.
My original itinerary called for three nights and two full days here on Assateague Island. I had envisioned spending much of that time lounging at the beach, but this wind has put a damper on those plans. We explored the island as much as we could yesterday, so today we were faced with the question, “Well, what do we do now?”
Since Delaware is just up the coast a bit, we decided to make a little day trip there just to say we did it. The kids hadn’t been to Delaware, yet, and neither had I, and if we went, we figured we could cross that off the list of states we still need to visit.
To get there, we had to go north, back through Ocean City, Md. Turns out, the part we saw yesterday, with all the strip malls and fast food restaurants, was actually West Ocean City. Ocean City is not much better, though. It is basically a car-clogged highway crammed -- I mean crammed -- with motels and efficiency apartments with names like the Shangri La and Casablanca Oceanside Inn, and throngs of people who look like they just strolled in from “Jersey Shore” lugging coolers across four lanes of traffic on their way to the beach. It goes on like this for, like, 10 or 15 miles -- basically all the way to the Delaware state line.
We spent the afternoon in Rehoboth Beach, Del., which is, as best as we can tell, a tourist town, although not quite on the scale of Ocean City. It’s got a long strip of t-shirt and souvenir shops, a ton of cars, people, motels and beach rentals -- and a boardwalk with an amusement park where we let the kids loose with pockets full of ride tokens. It was a nice change of pace for all of us, but after an afternoon of that, I was happy to get back to the relative serenity and seclusion of our Assateague campsite.
We’re not sure what we’re doing tomorrow. I built some flexibility into our schedule by leaving tomorrow night unplanned. The day after that, we head into D.C. So this may be our last night of camping. We celebrated with a campfire wienie roast and s’mores.
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