Tryin’ to reason with hurricane season,* or We interrupt this program for an important trip west

For starters, we’re admitting up front that this post sucks.  We’ve been slow-playing things because we got down to the Chesapeake Bay a few days early but not enough days early to do anything noteworthy.  Plus we’ve been busy getting ready to head out west for three weeks.  But the blog is free, so we don’t expect an uproar.

Have we mentioned the heat and humidity yet?  It maybe hasn’t been quite as hot as Phoenix, but it’s also been as humid as someplace so humid you’d use it in a very exaggerated simile.  Just walking off the boat generated sweat that dripped into crevices where sweat shouldn’t go.**  But we’re of hardy stock, so we bravely carried on with all the important stuff we needed to do inside the air conditioned boat.

Anyway, from Rock Hall we popped down to Kent Narrows, which is a shallow and skinny strait that separates Kent Island from the rest of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The importance for us is that the narrows cuts hours off the trip to St. Michaels, albeit at the risk of getting stuck on a shoal or having current smash us into the bridge.  Before we reached the bridge, however, Narrows Pointe gave us a great one-night spot without boats or buildings blocking our view.  In the drone photo, we’re at the bottom left.

Although mostly we stayed on the boat so as to avoid near-certain death by heat stroke, at dusk things cooled down enough for a scooter ride along the most awesome Cross Island Trail.  We’re pretty confident that the people who put up the “No Motorized Vehicles” signs didn’t have small scooters with itty bitty electric motors in mind when they did so.

Friday night at bedtime—well into pitch-black darkness—a massive lightening storm lit up the sky like strobe lights at a nightclub.  We watched for about thirty minutes but then got sleepy because after all it was bedtime.  We’ve never seen anything like it though.  Multiple jolts per second.  Tesla coil-ish.  Crazy.

The other highlight of our brief stop was eating at the iconic Red Eyes.  Doug got a shirt.

The Kent Narrows Bridge in fact did turn out to be squeezy—and the funneling water did turn out to be churny—but we made it through.

Approaching The Town That Fooled the British, we bumbled into our second Chesapeake Bay Log Canoe Race.  Unfortunately, yet again we didn’t have a chance to buzz them with the drone.

About St. Michaels.  As previously documented, we love St. Michaels.  St. Michaels is near the top of our list.

And when you’re in St. Michaels, you get tacos or gazpacho at Gina’s, except for that one time when Gina was on vacation or something so it was closed and we were sad.

We do note one oddity, however.  For a town that revels in its history of thwarting British attacks, St. Michaels has an awful lot of flags honoring England flying around.***

We did a very poor job of documenting our stop at Herrington Harbour South, mostly because we did a poor job of doing much.  In our defense it was hot, humid, and rainy, and there’s not much around other than a very nice marina with a name that is spelled like it’s in Great Britain.  Or Canada.  On the way in we drove through a school of fish, however, and Dana got the best photo possible.  If you zoom in and look very closely you can see a few tiny smiley fish faces through the water.

Oh yeah.  We did find time to walk through the wedding venue at the beach, where we tooled around on a kayak and a paddle board, so there’s that.

Yesterday we cruised the whopping three miles to Herrington Harbour North, where Tumbleweed will await our return.  There’s even less to do up here, although here’s a photo of “Historical Village.”  That’s the sum total of readily-available information.  No signs saying “At this site George Washington once ate Indian Fry Bread.”  Nothing.  The four nondescript buildings don’t even look old.  But it’s all we got.

In theory, we need to be hustling down to Ft. Lauderdale to meet the ship that’ll be carrying Tumbleweed to new adventures in the Pacific Northwest.  Our insurance company, however, is a tad skittish about hurricanes and such.  Plus, we want to go to California to help the girls move.  Hopefully we’ll miss the storms and Zimmerman’s will get a few minor service items resolved.  The good news is that when we fire up the blog again in a few weeks, there’s no way future posts can be as lame as this one.

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*To honor the recently-departed King of the Parrotheads, we’ve littered the last couple of posts with Buffett lines like Florida laundry rooms are littered with jorts.  We’ll move on now, but if the Volunteers take down the lyin’, cheatin’, gang-bangin’ dirtbags from the cesspool that is Gainesville, Florida, this Saturday, we might work in a few more jort references.  Also, major props to Texas.  Nick Saban and Alabama fans being miserable always is something to celebrate.

**“Security isn’t a dirty word, Blackadder.  Crevice is a dirty word, but security isn’t.”  — General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett

***Only recently did we learn that the Union Jack is a combination of Saint George’s Cross (England), Saint Andrew’s Cross (Scotland), and Saint Patrick’s Cross (Ireland).   We previously just associated it with England.  Boy were we dumb.