Scary Campground

On Friday morning we took the ferry from Cape May, NJ to Lewes, Delaware. Everyone made it on board that wanted to for the 90 minute, 18 mile voyage. After arriving we headed inland to Easton where we had read about an Amish Market. The food was excellent....what we ate for lunch and what we consumed over the week-end.......and we wished later that we had purchased more.

Our next stop was Ocean City, Maryland, back on the coast. It is basically a long, narrow sand spit filled with hotels on both shorelines with a road down the middle containing bars and restaurants.......with 10 miles of sandy beach it looked like a real party city during the summer but it was very quiet in late October. There was no available space left for campgrounds so we took the bridge back over to the mainland and found a place not too far away called Frontier Town in Berlin. To our surprise there was a line-up of vehicles to register for sites at the campground and when we got to the front of the line there were only 10 sites left out of 600+. This was quite strange to us since everywhere we else we had stayed had been less than 25% full. As it turns out, the schools were closed on Friday so it created a long week-end for families and with good weather forecast everyone was trying to squeeze in a final camping w/e..........much like we do in Alberta........around Labour Day. What we did not know until we settled into our campsite was that the campground was also hosting Halloween activities all week-end. More than 50% of the sites were decorated, most of them much more elaborate than homes usually are at the end of October. It was quite incredible to walk around the campground viewing the sights and watching the young children enjoying themselves while touring with their parents. We quickly went back to the registration office and booked another night while it was still available. The next night we walked around again seeing even more scary scenes that we had missed the night before. It was also obvious that families had grouped together for the trip (close to Baltimore) as had many young adults since there were often 10-15 people around each campfire.

This morning we continued south along the coast into Virginia, another long, narrow piece of land seperated from the mainland by several bridges and called the Eastern Shores region. We stopped at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge Park for a 7km hike including a walk along a small part of the 10 mile sandy beach with very few people around on a sunny day approaching 20C. The ocean water was a little cooler but I had to venture calf-high into the Atlantic to complete a coast-to-coast touchdown (we were on Vancouver Island in early spring).

We have settled into a campground by the water which is only 10% full but apparently it was totally full this morning (Sunday) as they also had Halloween activites all week-end........and we are still a week away from the real thing.........not sure what we should expect!