Girls' Guide To The Eastern Shore
Kessler Burnett on shopping, dining, and dishing on the Shore.
Rainy Date
Warning: This type of weekend outing is not for every Shore-loving girl. I think we were the only people on the Delmarva Peninsula who opted for a Saturday at Assateague while in the belly of a four-day Nor’easter. Despite the fact that the rain was cold and consistent, I was psyched about the trip. It had been years since I had seen the ponies, walked the wide, white sands, and gnawed on some taffy. Besides, I find storms make the best beach days. So with the dog in the back of the truck, we headed out from Easton, opting for back roads through towns that even I, a veteran traveler of the Shore, had never heard of. (Raise your paw if you’ve ever been to Wango!) Perhaps the best surprise of the trip was the fact that my friend’s truck radio was broken, forcing us to return to a nearly extinct communication medium: conversation—about five solid hours of it, I might add. While the storm was somewhat mild inland, at the seashore, the winds had tripled and the rain was hurling sideways. I put on my best cowboy face and jumped out of the truck where the wind pushed me around like a gum wrapper. Adding to the misery was the sand storm, which had, within seconds, had covered the poor dog with a wet, gritty, brown blanket. I turned tail and headed back to the truck while my friend pressed onward toward the crest of the dunes, seemingly impervious to rude elements. Now saddled with wet jeans, sand in every exposed orifice, and, did I mention, no radio, we drove out of the park, whizzing past a few rangy horses, their charm totally resistible to wet me. I was calmed by thoughts of a warm fire, dry clothes, and a good meal, but a few wrong turns on the highway detained us even longer, leading us directly to the front door of Frontier Town, which my friend insisted we tour. Somehow we made our way into the heart of the trailer park, which, being it close to Halloween eve, had been converted into FrontFEAR Town. Here, little ghosts and goblins were Trick-or-Treating from homely trailer to homely trailer, supervised by mothers in pumpkin-colored Halloween-theme sweatshirts and strong-arming crippled umbrellas, bent and twisted from the wind and pelting rain. There was no escape: For the next half an hour, we were forced to travel at 5 mph, stuck behind the parade of youngsters being shuttled around in golf carts fashioned with Reynold’s plastic wrap dashboards to shield the driver from the rain. I suppose the disaster that was our day would be enough to end most friendships, but it was just enough to keep us laughing for the entire two and a half hours back home—and probably for days to come.
Comments (1)Posted on 10/20/09 at 11:40 AM
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