US50 Phase 1: Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

Sep 22

 

Spent the morning at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime museum. (And finally limbered up the camera!)

On the way there I came within a couple thousand feet of the southwest corner of Delaware but did not feel the need to detour just to say I had been there. Maybe some other trip, though I’m not too sold on this east coast stuff at the moment, too many people.

I also drove through Cambridge (The Virginia one of course, not the Boston one made famous by all the ‘This Old House’ projects filmed there over the years.) before leaving the highway at Easton and working my way across to Saint Michaels on the Chesapeake Bay. The road to Saint Michaels is a modest two-lane with very heavy traffic. Heavy enough that what the locals consider a big enough gap to pull out into traffic is enough to put skid-marks in a visitor’s pants! Kind of reminds me of driving in Caracas Venezuela where lane markings, stop signs, traffic lights and traffic laws, and sometimes common sense, mean little more than nothing.

But the Chesapeake Bay Maritime museum is a combination museum, boatshop and boatbuilding school and a pretty cool place well worth a visit. Dad would have loved to be wandering the place with me, and perhaps he was. Before I left home I tucked his work gloves, the last pair he used before he died, into the van with me so I could take him along. Those gloves say Dad to me even more than photos of him and I know he would have so enjoyed traveling the country again.

Part boat shop

After spending a good while at the museum I worked my way back through the kamikaze traffic to the highway (US 50 of course.) then followed it over the Bay Bridge to Annapolis and DC. Despite similar names this is not the same bridge as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, this one is at the north end of the bay and I was all set to pay the $5 toll, but apparently you only pay when leaving Annapolis and heading east. I guess they want to keep you in. . .

Part boatbuilding school

I seem to be following a theme so far on this trip. I got into the mall area of DC (Kind of an obligatory stop when you’re this close.) and found out it was the Library of Congress’s book fair weekend! The place was crawling with people and cars and bereft of parking spots so I drove around, saw what I could see through the windshield, then headed west into Virginia.

and Part museum

If I thought I was going to be able to relax and breath as I headed west out of DC I was wrong! I used to live right here back in the dark ages of the early 70’s but it's not the same place at all! Where you used to be able to breathe a little once you got west of Manassas, is now wall to wall city and it goes on almost all the way to the Blue Ridge Mountains!

I kept right on running (Though I wasn’t running so much as growing roots at one point as I tried to get clear of an unexplained traffic tie-up on the outskirts of DC.) until I got to Winchester VA. And to be fair, I saw a few empty fields in between the housing and shopping developments just before I got there.

Just on the west side of Winchester is the Candy Hill Campground. Even though it was a Sunday and people should have been home getting ready for the workweek and not out camping, it was pretty full, including a large contingent of Mennonites, but there were still sites available.

Turns out the local apple harvest festival was going on through the rest of the eweek. . . I hope this festival crap isn’t going to be a recurring theme on this trip!

Big boats - Big tools!

The rich cousins --- I knew I should have been nicer to them!

I was parked next to a couple from Sweden driving a German motorhome that they had shipped over to Baltimore nearly a year before. They were actually wrapping up their trip of the US and Canada and heading back to Baltimore in a few days to put their rig on a boat for the ride back to Europe.

US50 Phase 1: Ocean City Maryland and the start of the highway

Sep 21

 

Back on the road pushing through more of the thick population.

Even if I were driving this stretch in the dead of night with no traffic around I would still know a lot of people live around here because there are freeways everywhere! (Makes you wonder if there’s any room left on the ground for other things!)

I passed one city right after another, Highpoint, Greensboro, Burlington, Durham, Raleigh, as I moved on into Virgina and pushed across to Norfolk. The cities came so fast there wasn't time to breath between them!

 

My nephew used to be stationed in Norfolk when he was in the navy but he's long out and moved on so I didn’t stop in town, instead I went on around to the east side where I paid my $12 to take the Chesapeake Bay bridge across the mouth of the bay (Chesapeake of course!) to the ‘East Shore’. This ‘bridge’ consists of some 20 miles of two parallel 2-lane bridges interrupted twice by tunnels that allow ship traffic in and out of the bay unhindered. These tunnels are only two lanes wide, one in each direction. Traffic was light when I was on it but I had to wonder what it's like trying to get across this thing in heavy traffic all trying to cram into those two tunnels. I also noticed that almost every light pole along the way had a single seagull sitting on top of it. I wonder how they decide who gets to sit where! Maybe they have a reservation system. . .

The southern end of the peninsula on the east side of the Chesapeake seemed like it was either farms or tourism. There was a cool little railroad track running right alongside the highway most of the way up the southern part of the peninsula. Short-line railroading at it's best. Light weight rails, tight clearances, a few small customers, in other words, human scale railroading. Just my luck though, no train today.

Maybe I lived on the coast in Mississippi a little too long, but over the past decade or so this kind of country gives me the hebejebes as I keep envisioning all these people trying to get out of the way of a hurricane. But out here is where US50 starts, right there on a barrier island, (In other words a sand bar!) off the Atlantic coast at Ocean City MD so here I am.

I arrived at Ocean City only to discover that this is Sunfest weekend. I don't know what Sunfest is, but clearly a lot of other people do!  Great timing on my part!

I saw no warning signs as I went over the causeway to Ocean City proper but I sure am glad I wasn’t driving anything larger than I was! There are two main north/south streets in town one block apart, each of them one-way traffic. One goes north up the narrow barrier island and the other goes south and they are connected by little more than alleys going east/west, and every square foot not already covered by high priced parking lots was supporting a building or amusement park, or a pier. Even if the place wasn’t crawling with people and cars because of the festival it would have been a challenge to get wrapped around and back on the causeway out of this place if I was driving anything larger than what I was. Even if I had found a parking spot that didn’t cost as much as a decent restaurant meal, I doubt I would have stopped to take a closer look. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, crowds are just not my kind of thing. . .

Not my photo but couldn't find who to attribute it to.

So I just made a loop through town and escaped back across the causeway, having achieving my goal of touching the eastern most point of US50 which, by the time it ends in Sacramento is the longest continuous US highway in the country.

About 15 miles to the west along US50 I found a campground with spaces available. I guess there are so many people living around here within easy day trip distance of the festival the pressure on overnight accommodation isn’t as high as it might be say around Big Bend Texas during spring break. Then again this is a big campground with over 100 sites, pavilions and ball-fields and outdoor kitchens and they even offer a scheduled shuttle bus into the ‘festivities’ at Ocean City. Though I had no trouble getting a site for the night despite no reservation, clearly this place sees a lot of campers.

I wandered the campground, as is my habit; curiosity and all that; and ran into a couple full-timing in a pickup camper as well as another couple weekending in a very large rig with a gnome garden and full sized Tiki-bar set up on their site. Kind of fun seeing the diversity.

US50 - Phase 1: Still heading for the Northeast

Sep 20 2012

 

Another day of covering distance.

After ‘taking a ‘hike’ around the truck-stop to ward off kinks, I got back on the road this morning expecting to deal with morning rush in Montgomery AL, but it never really materialized, at least not the rush I’m used to. In fact I passed a sign saying Montgomery was 8 miles ahead but I was still in deep woods with no indication there was a city anywhere around! I guess having grown up in the sprawled population of southeastern Michigan and spending the last 30 years in and around Houston, the 4^th largest city in the country, has skewed my expectations a little.

Just after crossing the Alabama/Georgia line I saw a sign for the KIA exit. I’m sitting there trying to figure out why someone named a road Killed-In-Action when I burst out of the trees and to the left saw a massive assembly plant for KIA automobiles. This place is so big they built dedicated two lane wide ramps for it off the freeway!

Somewhere between there and Atlanta I noticed that I could not get by a single on-ramp anymore without someone coming down it and wanting my space on the freeway, not that there was a lot of free space on the freeway now anyway. There were so many people around I began to get the jitters! (For the last 10 years we have lived 100 miles outside the city and I timed my excursions into Houston so I arrived at the beginning of the week in the dark of pre-dawn before most had gotten up and left at the end of the week before most of them got off work.)

After watching the cars get ever thicker on the road for most of the day, especially when I was skirting around Atlanta, I finally stopped at the Crosswinds campground just north of Salisbury NC. It was a bit of a challenge stopping there since roadwork had completely re-arraigned everything in the area so the directions in The Book were of no use at all. (Y'all know The Book, the Trailer Life Campground Guide.)

It was worth the effort though. It’s not often you find a private campground set back away from the main roads and laid out in the woods with untouched buffer zones between the sites, much like the state forest campground at Monocle Lake Michigan used to be. Crosswinds even had a small lake tucked into the trees and some short trails leading down through the woods to it.

I didn’t stay down there by the lake long though. Across the far side stretched some high voltage electric lines and in the silence I could actually hear them crackling. I’ve worked closely, very closely, with electricity my entire professional career, but it was still creepy hearing those electrons trying to get loose!

US50 - Phase 1: Finally on the road!

September 19 2012

 

On the Road!

After pushing the actual start date back as far as I could and still be able to make it to Michigan on schedule, I got the wheels rolling this morning. Once I was actually driving today it got easier, but I’m not sure if that’s because I'm getting into the whole idea of the trip or if it’s simply a function of having a task (The activity of driving.) to concentrate on. I suspect it might be the latter at this point.

But anyway, I’ve been over this ground time and time again for the last 30 years, through Houston and across Louisiana and Mississippi, so I’m just making miles today. Which is pretty much all I have left myself time for.

Left this morning after sunrise and hit Houston just after the morning rush. Then I kept right on going until after dark when I ended up in a truck stop a little south of Montgomery AL for the night. The van works out very well for this since I can park inconspicuously in a standard car slot off to the side somewhere and have everything I need without even opening the door if I don’t want to.

The bed in the van is much more firm than the one at home but I didn’t have any trouble sleeping. I guess since I’ve been practicing moving from the bed at home to this bed on a weekly basis for the past two years that shouldn’t be a surprise.

US50 - Phase 1: Just a few more days until road time!

Sep 2012

 

Coming up on half a year retired; and the trip is looming!

I have to say that in my case I highly recommend retiring. In fact it is almost scary, OK, sometimes it’s definitely scary, how easily I left my work-a-day life, and persona, behind and settled into just being me. It feels like I can breathe again, like I can truly relax.

My routines have always been important to me, my grown up version of a security blanket.  All those little things I do every day that let me know I'm still taking my proper place in the overall scheme of things, that all is right with my world. So as I moved into retirement and the impending loss of so many of those little routines I worried about life without them.

How was I going to structure my days? Either that or how was I going to manage without structure to my days? Was I going to continue to feel right with the world once my labors weren’t so focused on the outer world but rather more on the inner world of me?

Well for me the answer is yes. I have enough structure to keep my inner self happy. Little things like waking up at sunrise (Waking naturally; no alarm clocks!) and working out as dawn sweeps down the hill to the west. In fact I’m working out much more regularly now than when I was working. Can’t use the excuse of a hard day or late hour to get out of it now. (But rain days are allowed!) I guess you could say I’m now living with a ‘flexible’ set of routines and much of my time just happens depending on the needs and wants of the moment rather than being scheduled.

I find that my sense of well-being, of accomplishment, isn’t completely dependent on being able to check off a list of the day’s accomplishments. When I do finish something concrete, like fixing a broken door or setting a carving on the curing rack so the finish can harden off, it feels good, but if I spend the afternoon kicked back in a chair reading I don’t feel guilty about it.

As for the days going by, I can remember my parents commenting after they retired, that they couldn’t figure out how they ever kept up with all the things they had to do and worked a regular job at the same time. I’m seeing the truth in that now. There’s plenty to do to keep me busy and I can only marvel that I used to do all this in the short time left over after my ‘paying’ job.

So all in all I’m enjoying my freedom and my life and I don’t find myself missing the things I left back there at the office. Other than the occasional flash of curiosity, I’ve never felt like I wanted to go back to it.

So what’s scary about all that? Well maybe, just maybe it’s been a little too easy. Maybe I’m just fooling myself and this initial phase of well-being will wear off; but right now it doesn’t feel that way.

But it’s not all roses. Take this trip for example. This is something I’ve been dreaming about and planning for years. A trip that doesn’t have to be crammed into the unforgiving brackets of a two week vacation, a trip without obligations, OK, with few obligations. (If I ever got that close to Michigan and didn’t stop in to visit the family I wouldn’t have a family to visit!) but now I find myself ambivalent about it, which is probably my way of coping with the fact that I’m afraid of it.

What’s there to be afraid of? Well let’s see. (a) Maybe over the years I’ve built up this unattainable expectation of what this trip will be in my mind and I’m going to be crushed when it doesn’t hit the mark. (2) I’m just getting settled into this retirement thing and now I’m going to take off for a month or more!? What if it breaks the whole status quo? (Thirdly)What if I find out I don’t know how to take a trip like this or even worse, that I don't like it?!

OK, that last one is pretty close to the first, but still; Every road trip I’ve taken since I left home at age 17 was either tightly scheduled (There’s that structure thing again!) or was exactly that, a road trip focused on getting somewhere else. I’m pretty good at knocking off 800 to 900 miles in a day in order to get from here to there (Usually Texas to Michigan) in the shortest time possible, watching the country go by through the windshield at 60+ miles an hour, touching the ground only when I need fuel or a pee. Am I going to be any good at covering a couple hundred miles a day, or even less, and actually touching that countryside? What am I going to do with all the hours of the day if I’m not driving? Can I become the tourist? Checking out restored downtowns and little community museums? Will I be able to find trails to hike, monuments to visit?

It’s not a reaction I was expecting and now I don’t know what to do with it; so I’ve been letting the trip creep closer and closer without doing all that much about it. Not talking about it, not packing for it, not pouring over my maps; not much at all.

 

So now I can't put it off any longer. It's time to find out if this is going to work.

US50 - Phase 1: Opportunity and Fear

Nov 2011

 When does a road trip really start? I suppose there’s an argument for the ‘it starts when you turn the key and leave the driveway’ answer, – but I don’t think so. – I think some, maybe most, road trips begin long before that. (OK, I’ll concede that that may not be true if you’re under the age of 25, invincible and subject to the sudden ‘Hey! I got a great idea!’ syndrome but – well –last time I saw 25 was more than 25 years ago. . .)

For me this particular road trip started – well just how philosophical do I want to get here? – There’s a family story that my first road/camping trip occurred in a borrowed tent when I was two months old. Of course I can’t personally confirm that story, but I can confirm that I was raised in a tradition of camping and exploring this country that probably helped establish a certain propensity in me for wandering the roads. So if you wanted to take things to the extreme you could say the first bricks of this trip were laid some 57 years ago, but to keep things a little more realistic, I think of this trip as starting with an idea born of opportunity and fear in early 2011.

The opportunity is looming retirement. The fear is – well – looming retirement.

The first part, opportunity, is pretty much self-explanatory. When it comes to road trips verses work schedules, work schedules usually win, forcing some significant compromises on the road trip side of the equation. Retirement either eliminates the work schedule or makes it flexible enough that the road trip can finally win.

The second part, fear, might be a little more difficult to explain; or perhaps not. If you have faced a significant life change you might already understand the fear part. And retiring will be a significant life change for me. Even though I might be pulling the trigger a little earlier than most, I have still spent the last 40 years, 45 if you count summer jobs, working for a paycheck.

I don’t know what it’s going to be like to live without that regular income, or without the majority of my time pre-scheduled. How am I going to handle the money worries and what am I going to do with my time? I don’t know what it will be like to wake up one morning without all the responsibilities I had on my plate at work. Will that be a relief or will it be a big hole? I don’t know how to take a trip with no deadlines. Will I be able to shed the ‘got to get there and get back’ mentality of the past 40 years? I don’t know if – well – obviously there’s a lot of I-don’t-knows ahead as I move into this new phase of my life.

US50 - Phase 1: Forward

The original premise of this trip, my retirement trip, was to follow US50 from one end to the other. Running some 3000 miles from Ocean City Maryland to Sacramento California US50 is (I think?!) the longest single continuous highway in the United States and that seemed like a pretty cool way to kick off retirement. But things change and the best plans are flexible plans. (Is that just me trying to find the best light for a situation I had no control over? Maybe. . .)

For some reason this trip had to be done east to west, it just wouldn’t be right to do it west to east. I’m not sure I can explain why, in fact I know I can’t explain why, but that’s the way it is and that's the way I'm going to do it.
 

Because I didn’t want to get tangled up with a swarm of families taking advantage of the kids being out of school the original plan was to start my trip in early September, when the kids are heading back to school and my only exposure to them is stopping for the bus as they are heading home in the afternoon. (As it turned out I did have to dodge a class field trip at one location on this trip. Hadn’t thought about that. . .)

Not only does this timing keep me out of the summer crowds it also dodges the summer heat. But it does have me walking a thin line. Remember that east to west requirement?  That means the last half of the trip is through the Western mountains. If I’m going to avoid inconvenient things like campgrounds and other attractions being closed for the season, and nasty things like snowed in passes, I have to slip through that part of the trip with just the right timing.

As it turned out, the universe, and Pablo, had other things in mind.

Pablo is from Chile and when I was – when both of us were – high school kids he lived with us as an exchange student for the better part of a year. During that time he became an important part of our family. Contrary to what some may have felt after a particularly long absence of visit or contact, I am still part of that family, so when Pablo’s schedule gave him the opportunity to get to Michigan (The family home) for the first time in some 35 years I adjusted my schedule to fit his without hesitation  – um – Yeah! That's how I did it - without hesitation. . .

 

I was always going to make a stop in Michigan anyway during this trip (Passing by only one state away and not stopping in would have been – well – bad. . .) but the stop probably wouldn’t have been quite as long as it turned out to be nor would it have been so late in the season.

As it was, I didn’t end up leaving Michigan for the continuation of my trip until the first week of October, which put me about 3 weeks behind my original schedule.  (I can still hear the universe chuckling.) This pretty much guaranteed that by the time I got into the western portion of my planned trip many campgrounds, points of interest, museums, etc. would be shutting down for the winter since people tend not to camp so much when the snow is butt-deep on the ground, snotcicles form within minutes of stepping outside and the mountain passes are often closed while the plow drivers are stuck at home trying to stay warm!

I bravely forged on, (OK, maybe there wasn’t a whole lot of actual bravery required, but, in the tradition of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson and other great explorers, who all went first and showed me the way was safe, I did forge on!) but by the time I got to La Junta in eastern Colorado I had to face the hard facts. According to my campground guide and web research the majority of the campgrounds and quite a few points of interest out in front of me were within days of closing for the season and I knew my nice symmetrical coast to coast trip was not to be.

I made the decision – well, not made so much as finally accepted it – to come back next season to complete the rest of the original trip.

This did have a side effect, and it was the good kind, not like the double vision or anal leakage you read about on the side of your brand new medication. I ended up in places that weren’t part of the original plan, some pretty cool places as I left US50 behind at La Junta and headed southwest into New Mexico.