Adventures in road tripping

As I mentioned, we are home, I am doing mountains of laundry, and at least the grown-ups are pretty exhausted. DJ is bouncing off the walls, as usual. The trip went well, we didn't get to see or do as much as we would have liked, because it was extremely hot and humid, and we never really made it to the beach. We did spend a lot of time in hotel pools and DJ has become a regular fish, the completely opposite of last summer, when he didn't want to get into the water at all.

I'm going to skip the disastrous beginning (we hadn't even gotten on the road yet), because everything worked out fine. We drove to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and got settled into our hotel. A storm was moving in, but we took a quick drive down to Dewey Beach, so I could take a couple pictures. The restaurant closest to our hotel was this fun little place called Cracker Barrel. Just as we finished dinner, the storm hit, and it was right on top of us. Outside Cracker Barrel, they have lots of rocking chairs (they sell them), so we sat there, under the porch roof and watched the downpour, lightning and listened to the huge booming thunder. DJ was cheering for the thunder, he loved it. I was ready to jump into my mom's lap. Not a fan, thank you.

Anyway, when we woke up the next morning, the storm had passed, and we packed up the car. Rehoboth Beach is known for its outlet stores and Delaware is a tax-free state. So, of course, we had to do a little shopping. DJ got some back-to-school clothes. We drove down and walked along the boardwalk for awhile, then walked back to the car along the beach, splashing in the waves a bit. That is the extent of our beach fun for the entire trip. We spent the day casually driving down to Ocean City, Maryland. We stayed in a really nice hotel there and spent the rest of the evening playing in the pool. After dinner and bath time, DJ fell asleep in less than 5 minutes.

Tuesday, we began our drive to Williamsburg. We stopped to visit an island in Virginia called Chincoteague. It is famous for a special kind of pony. Every year, they swim the ponies (at low tide) from Assateague Island to Chincoteague Island, and then they are auctioned off. Apparently there is a famous childrens book (true story) about it. Anyway, my mom had read the book as a child and loves horses, so we made a stop to check out the island. That big event was on Wednesday, so the island was PACKED. We saw some of the ponies that already lived on the island, some of the mares were older than me!!! We got into Williamsburg later in the evening, had to find a walmart, and grabbed dinner. Then we spent some time in the pool before bath and bedtime.

Oh! On the way to Williamsburg, we had the opportunity to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which is just amazing. It is 17.6 miles of bridge and tunnel, from shore to shore. You have the Atlantic Ocean on one side of you and the Chesapeake Bay on the other. We happened to get caught in a very nasty rain storm while we were crossing. You could barely see anything, which was a little scary. It's a very cool experience, though. It's just so immense and when you go into the tunnel parts, you are so far under the water. The tunnels are deep enough to allow aircraft carriers and big tankers to cross over.


The plan was to visit the Jamestown Colony and Settlement on Wednesday and Yorktown on Thursday, before heading to North Carolina. However, Wednesday was expected to be close to 100 degrees, close to 115 with the heat index, and extremely humid. We did go to the Jamestown Colony, but we couldn't stay long, as it was so hot and humid, we couldn't breathe. It was disappointing, but we went back and spent the rest of the day in the pool.

Thursday was expected to be hotter, so we skipped Yorktown and headed to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. We got there earlier than planned, obviously, but we checked into the hotel, got some lunch, had a little downtime, then jumped into the pool for quite awhile.

We had intended to drive all the way to Cape Hatteras (nearly 3 hours from the hotel) to see the lighthouse and visit all the other cool things along the Outer Banks. It quickly become obvious we couldn't see it all in a day (or even 2 days, we missed a lot), so we extended our vacation a day and spent 2 days driving up and down the Outer Banks.

Some hightlights: Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, The Wright Brothers Memorial Park (the site of their first attempts at powered flight), and the Monster Truck Grave Digger's official home. We did stop by a beach to check it out, but it had been so hot outside, the sand was burning our feet (especially DJ, who kept crying), and the water was quite rough, so we didn't stay and play.

I took a lot of pictures, but for whatever reason, many of them came out blurry. Not sure what that's about as I've never had a problem with the camera before. Maybe the heat and humidity? I really don't know. In any event, all the pictures are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/megsphotos08/

I'm sure I'm forgetting things, so I may post again later, I'm just completely wiped out today. It's good to be home, but I miss having pools so close and convenient. It was great to wear DJ out.