We spent Labor Day weekend out on the beach in Maryland. It was a chill and fun time. I was feeling kind of tired and ill the day before we left, but Jeannie did most of the driving, so I got some extra rest on the ride, and was basically alright by the next morning. We did spend a good amount of time just hanging out in the hotel room sipping our coffee, or later on in the day a beer, watching and listening to the ocean, which was nice and relaxing.
Saturday we went out to Assateague Island, where we did the classic Swamp Walk. There were a few wildlife encounters we’d never seen before, including a pair of giant horseshoe crabs swimming along the shore of the bay, and a good-sized ray, as well as some gar and the usual crabs and fish and birds and wild ponies.
One new thing we did this year was to bring our bikes, so after the hike we took a ride all around the whole national seashore. It was a good day for it, not too hot, and we were able to get around to all the different places alot more conveniently than walking or by car, and explore a little more. We checked out the various campgrounds cuz that’s something we’ve always been interested in doing, and concluded that the bay side would be alot easier than the ocean side. We’ve been doing enough biking this summer that an eight or ten mile ride on (very) flat terrain felt easy and breezy. We ended the afternoon with a trip to the beach, then back to the hotel. That evening we went out to dinner on the boardwalk and met up with our friend Terry, who just happened to be in OC the same time as us.
They allow bicycles on the boardwalk before noon, so the next morning we rode from our hotel up around 30th street down the whole length of the boardwalk. The boardwalk is abut three miles long, and it’s always fund to see how its character develops as you get further downtown. We took it at a leisurely pace, and when we got the end, we we explored a little bit around the inlet and harbor. Another eight or ten mile ride. By the end it was getting pretty hot. We spent the afternoon on the beach in front of our hotel. We went out into the water a few times, but didn’t get out past the breakers to do much actual swimming. The waves were pretty rough and there were warnings up about severe rip tides and undertow. We saw the lifeguards jump into action a few times. Indeed it was a challenge to just to keep your balance in waist-deep water.
I usually don’t miss my kids when they’re not around, but as the weekend went on, a strange nostalgia for the time of my kids growing up times emerged. We used to go Ocean City almost every summer from the time Michelle was four to Lizzy was in high school, and we’ve gone back only a few times in the years since. So in my mind it’s sort of an end-of-the-summer happy place, just before back-to-school time. It’s funny how some things never really leave your mind. Those years coincided with the years I worked at MTV, and memories of old programming and business problems that was thinking heavily about back then began washing up into my consciousness like dead jellyfish on the beach.
The last day we went out for breakfast rather then lounging in our room, then went down to the boardwalk one more time and ended up in an arcade playing skee-ball and old pinball and video games. The ride home took a long time because of the traffic, but was pleasant enough because we there was fun an interesting stuff on the radio, mainly a countdown of (somebody’s idea of) the top forty albums in 1983, skewed heavily to AOR and hair bands. In fact there was alot of classic rock in the air the whole weekend, and the band we kept hearing over and over, surprisingly, was Styx.