There's nothing quite like a long weekend on the Eastern Shore to drive all those half-composed blog posts out of one's head. It's all coming back to me now, though, so I should get cracking.
We went back to Chincoteague, of course. We'd been planning to go back in the fall, but we bumped up our visit after we found that a high school friend of mine is living there now. (I need to think of a pseudonym for her, or ask her to pick one.) We've always wanted to have friends come with us to Chincoteague. The only thing that could make a relaxing barrier island vacation better would be to have friends along. Alas, whenever we've broached the subject, our friends say, "Uh. Well, we've been there already and there's nothing to do." And we say, "Yes! That's the whole point!" We were delighted to find that the perfect person was there all along. As well as her two adorable three-year-old kids and her retired parents living just up the street.
Her parents who are, like, the Nicest People in the World®, stopped by to say Hi. When I said how I was happy to find that they'd retired to my favorite place, they said, "Isn't it great here? There's nothing to do! We've even started watching birds." I said, "Yeah, and the birds here are really large and easy to identify." [I'm myopic. Bird-watching is not my thing, but even I can handle herons, ducks, and egrets.] Later, her mom sent over crab dip. My friend told me, "You rate! I don't get crab dip."
Our nothing-to-do was the usual. We made trips out to the wildlife refuge, engaged in a little fruitless pony watching (ponies not in evidence!), identified the large, easy-to-see birds, and spotted a muskrat, possibly an otter, and one of the endangered fox squirrels. One night we got up in the wee hours to watch a rocket launch from Wallops Island. We didn't see anything because (1) we were looking in the completely wrong place and (2) NASA missed their launch window so no rocket anyway. We were feeling kind of foolish till we learned (2) from the Wallops web site after we got home. I told Oz, "Hey, they're trying again tonight." "Want to go back?" "Tonight? It's in three hours."
Now he wants to plan our next trip around the launch schedule.
Somehow I don't think we're quite back in the real world yet.
414 words | April 25, 2007 10:03 PM | Wish you were here