I woke up at the B&B after too little sleep and got to know my hosts over breakfast. They had created it out of a gorgeous old Victorian they had found in this sweet college town just before Covid 19 shut everything down. My stay came just after restrictions started to be lifted. Breakfast was wonderful. I went upstairs, showered, and had a small accident–my bad luck continued on the Eastern Shore. While trying to get soap out of the dispenser, I blasted my eye with a scrub that may have caused abrasions because I spent the rest of the day in various degrees of eye discomfort. Perhaps it was fortunate that I could not drive. I moved ahead anyway with an online meeting with a thesis student before my friend collected me and took me to her home where I hung out with her family while she conducted an online board meeting for the museum she directs. I fell in love with the layout of her home, a wonderful Craftsman style house with an open floor plan that I would use as an architectural model if I were designing a beach house. This friend and her husband have taken on parenting of three of her nieces, and it was fun to hang with the girls and hear about their experiences of Covid. Eventually, I napped and they watched television while it poured rain.
I woke in early afternoon and the rain had cleared so we girls all piled into the car and headed for Assateague Island National Seashore for the afternoon. The beach was fairly quiet as Ocean City tends to get the heavy tourist trade. We sat in the sand eating sandwiches, chatting, napping, swimming, and seeing if the garage planned to actually repair my car or not. Obviously, it was not the completely relaxing day at the beach I needed, which motivates me to return at some point to try again. But it was full of great company.
We stopped at Frontier Town, an arcade and ice cream shop, on the road back to Cambridge for decadent cones and the atmosphere. Back in Cambridge, I picked up Burger King for my tow truck driver and us girls. In the dark of night, I finally headed back home to Virginia in the front cab of the tow truck, ready to put my car in the hands of my trusty mechanic at last, and hoping I could leave my bad travel luck behind me in my next foray into Maryland.