Another adequate night at the Walmart. This was the least aesthetic of them all. I coulda put up my curtain and snapped in my window cover, but I just didn’t feel like it, so it was too bright (and too humid) all night long, and it feels like I still need sleep.
But the major malfunction is that I want a shower really bad. I am finding that shower need ranks much higher in my hierarchy of needs than I woulda thought. I am not too compulsive about them in normal life, quite the contrary I think most would say, but I’m finding that when it’s time for one it’s really time for one, like today.
As ever, I wish to make lemonade out of my lemons, so here I am at Cape Henlopen State Park, a fascinating and beautiful, nearly deserted, very expensive park with what look to be excellent showers. woo. hoo. Much better than the Casper experience; $30 to have that squeaky clean feeling as least until morning, and I have bike trails and sand dunes and an Atlantic beach all to myself!
I had spent most of that day at the Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge, where I walked one really excellent trail (the Haystack?), and two forgettable, mosquito-ridden trails. I haven’t mentioned that since the cold snap weather of Vermont, I’ve gone a few states south and there has been some kind of warm snap. It’s made the shower-lust quite a bit more acute, and it’s really got the bugs going in a fin-de-siecle frenzy of skin-biting and blood sucking.
By the time I finished the final forgettable hike is was 3:30, and it suddenly occurred to me that if I’m gonna spend $30 to be camping at the beach, I should maximize my value by getting there well before dark, so I whiffled right down SR 1 to Lewes Delaware, past the Cape May Ferry to my lovely spot.
Wednesday
Raining on and off. The incipient rain made me get up earlier than usual to collapse and stow my bike. The combination of travelling 300 miles south and a changing weather pattern has taken me from winter (lows in the 20’s) to summer (high 70’s and sticky-wet). The flies, the mosquitoes … reminds me again of why I like to travel in the fall.
It’s raining a little bit as I start to pull out, but … I want to fill my water tank as long as I am right here next to a tap. The joke’s on me, it suddenly pours buckets for about six minutes, soaking me completely. No biggie, I change into another set of slightly used clothes, but kind of annoying.
Right north of my park is Lewes Delaware, the southern terminus of the Cape May Ferry. I breakfast at the quaint little (wifi’ed) place downtown. I quite like Lewes, I could see myself living here for a while.
Then the nearby Pinhook Refuge, with a very nice trail through the swamp, but it is very windy, so I saw almost no birds or wildlife of any sort.
Thence to other side of the peninsula, Blackwater Refuge on the Chesapeake Bay. On this day, this place didn’t work for me. I got there two minutes after the office closed, the wind had died down and the mosquitoes were terrible. The auto tour was quite nice, but the only birds were Canadian geese and mallards, who I see every day in Reno.
Tonight’s Walmart is in Easton MD. Applebee’s for World Series game 1. Most of the yahoos at the bar were for Texas … f— em :)
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