Old and new territory
I'm on my way to visit a friend (and maybe multiple friends, TBD) in North Carolina and I'm taking the trip semi-slowly. My first day started just as the rain did -- with me heading out the front door carrying luggage and the first drops just starting to fall. In the next couple of hours I would see everything from a deluge to a brief respite from all rain, well timed for me to be able to dash to the restroom and back relatively dryly.
That first restroom break was well timed in more ways than one. Just as it was becoming clear that it was time for a stop, I saw a freeway exit for a street that I lived on briefly as a first grader -- Belair Drive in Bowie, Maryland. I have dim memories that one of the ways we got home from various trips involved a long, slow-paced meander from the highway to our house. That was before we had air conditioning in our car, so in hot weather that meant that we went from having lots of air flowing in the car to just a little, and it seemed to go on forever for those last few miles. I didn't recognize this drive visually at all this time. Since the 1960's, the trees have grown way up from the spindly saplings I remember from my childhood to a woodsy environment that goes a long way toward camouflaging the limited number of styles of houses they built up quickly in the course of a few years. The houses have been modified over the years too -- people converted garages to extra rooms, built various kinds of extensions to the floorplan, installed banks of solar panels on the long, sloping roofs of the cape cod model... if I didn't know what to look for, I might not have recognized the familiar designs at all.
Memory is a funny thing, but then I guess it's not too surprising that as a child I would have had my address drilled into my memory for my own safety. I don't have clear memories of all the addresses I've lived in as an adult, but I remember 3115 Belair Drive, and on my way to finding a restroom to stop at I successfully spotted the house we rented while waiting for our newly-built one to be completed. I remember the house number, but I sure didn't remember the neighborhood being that hilly. No huge climbs, but not the flat terrain that had taken shape in my memory.
Back on the road, I still had a fair chunk of D.C. metro traffic to contend with, and then the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. These days they just call it the Bay Bridge on signs and on the radio, which is a bit surreal given my long-standing orientation toward San Francisco Bay, where "Bay Bridge" has only one unambiguous meaning: the Oakland Bay Bridge. I don't know how much it was due to riding with a higher vantage point in my van and how much it was due to the nonexistent superstructure of this bridge, but the view was surprisingly wide. A lot of bridges have one direction stacked on top of the other, but the Chesapeake Bay Bridge has two spans, one going each direction. My view of the other span was a bit disconcerting. Compared to the stalwart structures holding up the bridges in the SF Bay Area, this bridge looked to me like it was built with toothpicks and toilet paper rolls.
After some of the other stories I've told about my fear of heights, perhaps it seems odd that I'm not especially afraid of bridges. I can occasionally get spooked, but fear of bridges isn't particularly a thing for me. I hunted around a bit for photos of the bridge to illustrate my "toothpicks and toilet paper rolls" comment, but I found something even better: this video story by Inside Edition: https://www.insideedition.com/headlines/6448-is-this-the-scariest-bridge-in-america?viewfull=true If you are especially afraid of bridges you might not want to watch that video -- they spice it up with images from some historic bridge failures, including "Galloping Gertie" a.k.a. the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that was famously and spectacularly destroyed by wind in 1940. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you can see a lot more of Gertie's galloping antics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw
After crossing the bridge, the terrain started to change. The Eastern Shore of Maryland has a lot of agricultural land. I saw corn and soybeans -- familiar crops often seen by the side of the road in Indiana and Kentucky. I occasionally was able to glimpse bits of beautiful marshland or wild rivers and creeks. My goal for the day was to get all the way to Chincoteague Island and finally get to use my National Parks annual pass to enter the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. And... I made it! I even got a glimpse of the famed ponies, although not in a place where I could pull off and take a photo. The Chincoteague ponies hold a particular fascination for kids who grow up hearing stories about them, as was the case in Maryland. I always wanted to go see them as a child, but it didn't happen until now. This was a bucket list item for me.
When I could pull off in a pretty spot, I took this photo:
I've seen marshland on the West Coast, but there is a particular beauty to this mid-Atlantic marshland. I didn't stay long and I'm glad the wind was blowing (because it keeps the bugs at bay). Any town you enter and see an electronic sign announcing "The bugs are back!" and another sign for a clinic that says, "Bug bites -- we treat them!" is not a place I want to linger. But I'm glad I got to see it. And for those who are more outdoorsy (or just plain tougher) than I am, it is a quaint by-the-beach town with things to see and do that feels like it could fit in nicely at least 50 years in the past.
That first restroom break was well timed in more ways than one. Just as it was becoming clear that it was time for a stop, I saw a freeway exit for a street that I lived on briefly as a first grader -- Belair Drive in Bowie, Maryland. I have dim memories that one of the ways we got home from various trips involved a long, slow-paced meander from the highway to our house. That was before we had air conditioning in our car, so in hot weather that meant that we went from having lots of air flowing in the car to just a little, and it seemed to go on forever for those last few miles. I didn't recognize this drive visually at all this time. Since the 1960's, the trees have grown way up from the spindly saplings I remember from my childhood to a woodsy environment that goes a long way toward camouflaging the limited number of styles of houses they built up quickly in the course of a few years. The houses have been modified over the years too -- people converted garages to extra rooms, built various kinds of extensions to the floorplan, installed banks of solar panels on the long, sloping roofs of the cape cod model... if I didn't know what to look for, I might not have recognized the familiar designs at all.
Memory is a funny thing, but then I guess it's not too surprising that as a child I would have had my address drilled into my memory for my own safety. I don't have clear memories of all the addresses I've lived in as an adult, but I remember 3115 Belair Drive, and on my way to finding a restroom to stop at I successfully spotted the house we rented while waiting for our newly-built one to be completed. I remember the house number, but I sure didn't remember the neighborhood being that hilly. No huge climbs, but not the flat terrain that had taken shape in my memory.
Back on the road, I still had a fair chunk of D.C. metro traffic to contend with, and then the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. These days they just call it the Bay Bridge on signs and on the radio, which is a bit surreal given my long-standing orientation toward San Francisco Bay, where "Bay Bridge" has only one unambiguous meaning: the Oakland Bay Bridge. I don't know how much it was due to riding with a higher vantage point in my van and how much it was due to the nonexistent superstructure of this bridge, but the view was surprisingly wide. A lot of bridges have one direction stacked on top of the other, but the Chesapeake Bay Bridge has two spans, one going each direction. My view of the other span was a bit disconcerting. Compared to the stalwart structures holding up the bridges in the SF Bay Area, this bridge looked to me like it was built with toothpicks and toilet paper rolls.
After some of the other stories I've told about my fear of heights, perhaps it seems odd that I'm not especially afraid of bridges. I can occasionally get spooked, but fear of bridges isn't particularly a thing for me. I hunted around a bit for photos of the bridge to illustrate my "toothpicks and toilet paper rolls" comment, but I found something even better: this video story by Inside Edition: https://www.insideedition.com/headlines/6448-is-this-the-scariest-bridge-in-america?viewfull=true If you are especially afraid of bridges you might not want to watch that video -- they spice it up with images from some historic bridge failures, including "Galloping Gertie" a.k.a. the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that was famously and spectacularly destroyed by wind in 1940. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you can see a lot more of Gertie's galloping antics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw
After crossing the bridge, the terrain started to change. The Eastern Shore of Maryland has a lot of agricultural land. I saw corn and soybeans -- familiar crops often seen by the side of the road in Indiana and Kentucky. I occasionally was able to glimpse bits of beautiful marshland or wild rivers and creeks. My goal for the day was to get all the way to Chincoteague Island and finally get to use my National Parks annual pass to enter the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. And... I made it! I even got a glimpse of the famed ponies, although not in a place where I could pull off and take a photo. The Chincoteague ponies hold a particular fascination for kids who grow up hearing stories about them, as was the case in Maryland. I always wanted to go see them as a child, but it didn't happen until now. This was a bucket list item for me.
When I could pull off in a pretty spot, I took this photo:
I've seen marshland on the West Coast, but there is a particular beauty to this mid-Atlantic marshland. I didn't stay long and I'm glad the wind was blowing (because it keeps the bugs at bay). Any town you enter and see an electronic sign announcing "The bugs are back!" and another sign for a clinic that says, "Bug bites -- we treat them!" is not a place I want to linger. But I'm glad I got to see it. And for those who are more outdoorsy (or just plain tougher) than I am, it is a quaint by-the-beach town with things to see and do that feels like it could fit in nicely at least 50 years in the past.
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