The Bayshore Byway rambles through marshland and farming country, and is a beautiful drive on those lightly-trafficked two-lane roads we had missed.
Trees were flowering again as we drove farther south; we stopped to take a photo of this driveway leading to a farmhouse far from the road.
We drove through small towns whose names I did not record, and had a simple lunch at a little Mexican restaurant. This house was on the main street. How marvelous it would be to live in a house like this, in a town where the only place to eat on a Saturday morning (as far as we could tell) was a Mexican restaurant, where very little English seemed to be spoken back in the kitchen.
Fishermen had gathered all along the shore of the Delaware River on this Saturday morning, unloading their boats from trailers, and far across the river in the distant haze we could see the big towers of the Hope Creek Nuclear Power Plant.
We had read about the John Dickinson Plantation, and the stop there was worthwhile. The grounds were beautiful, green grass and dogwoods flowering.
John Dickinson is known at "The Penman of the Revolution," and this young docent took us through the main house; she was both knowledgeable and passionate about a man who had been instrumental in the Revolution.
Dickinson has written "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania," which had been one of the writings that had inspired people living in rural America in the 18th century to take the brash step of declaring itself independent from Britain.
We traveled farther south down the Chesapeake and finally reached the beginning of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel, a 20-mile route across Chesapeake Bay, once designated one of the Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World. I learned that the CBBT consists of 12 miles of low-level trestle, two one-mile-long tunnels (that seemed way too narrow to us), two bridges, two miles of causeway, four man-made islands, and 5-1/2 miles of approach roads. We stopped at one of the man-made islands, halfway-across, and took this photo of a huge oceangoing ship that had just passed over us in the tunnel.
It was beginning to drizzle when we arrived in Virginia Beach, just on the other side of the CBBT. We made our way through a maze of streets, using our Google Maps app, to a little restaurant named Blue, located in a strip shopping center and improbably rated No. 1 on TripAdvisor. It was absolutely packed on this Saturday night, crowded and noisy. Our server brought us out a tiny little crab's claw, an amuse bouche, while we were waiting. And then the main course arrived, perfectly presented and delicious. Flat-screen TVs hung on the walls, playing videos of fish swimming in the deep blue ocean. It was an unexpected highlight of the restaurants we had discovered on our road trip.
But as soon as we left the restaurant, back-navigating using our iPhone app, it began to rain, and then it began to pour rain, to the point where visibility in the decreasing daylight was a problem. We felt like a storm-tossed vessel, making its way to harbor out on a rough sea. Lightning flashed nearby.
"Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea . . ." - Tennyson
We were so relieved when we finally arrived back at our motel, and I could securely back our little boat into its safe berth, ready for tomorrow's leg of the journey.
No comments:
Post a Comment