Nuts to the Pandemic!

 Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020

As everyone knows, it’s been a crappy year. Since March, no one has really gone very far from home, and we felt that it was probably not a great year for a long-distance, long period of time vacation. We did take the RV for a long weekend down to Lum’s Pond State Park in Delaware, so we could celebrate Juniper’s first birthday in June. We stayed at the exact same site we had in 2019, with a lot of grass all around us. We brought down pop-up tens for some shade, and Beth invited only close relatives and the friends who were part of their “pod.” We all stayed socially distance outside, with masks handy, and had a lovely time together. But that was the RV’s only outing since our wonderful trip last fall.

This year, after “things” started loosening up just a LITTLE bit, I thought it would be good to just maybe take a short trip, 10 days or so. So we left home this morning and came down to Assateague State Park in Maryland to start things off. The immediate draw here was that tonight at 10:27pm, there was scheduled to be a rocket launch from NASA’s Wallops Island base. Wallops Island is only 30 miles due south as the crow flies from Assateague, and supposedly we would have a pretty good view of the launch and the rocket going up from here on the beach. So I made reservations and we hustled, trying to get out of the house the morning after Yom Kippur.

The holiday being the day before made it very difficult to really feel under control with our departure. I tried to have everything smooth, but in the end, i hadn’t even collected all our clothes together by the night before. As a result, this morning was a madhouse, including me oversleeping after staying up until midnight. I was running around like a nutcase, and in the end, i forgot a few things, like the Travel Journal I’ve taken on all of our previous trips for the past 15 years. I also forgot the set of new camera lenses Joey gave me for my cell phone. This is especially annoying because Assateague has wild horses, and having a zoom lens on my camera would be extremely helpful. 

Then the weather got ugly. I knew by last night that the launch had been delayed, due to the forecast of thunderstorms for the next two days. We got out of HP before the rain hit there, but we drove through some incredible rainstorms coming down here. The visibility was non-existent. Fortunately, we didn’t have much traffic and we arrived with no problems, and the rain stopped during the few hours when we arrived at the campground. It picked up again around 7:30pm or so, and indeed, it is raining quite hard and is miserable outside. There’s a strong breeze (or wind) blowing, but I can’t keep the windows open because the rain blew into the RV when i tried that. It’s supposed to rain all tomorrow as well..... i don’t know if we’ll just catch up on our sleep and our reading, or take the Jeep (which we have with us) and see if we can find someplace indoors to visit.

I guess the bottom line is, at least we aren’t still stuck at home. The rules here in the park are pretty strict regarding Covid 19 precautions, such as masks must be worn in the bathhouses. But we probably won’t be near many people here, the beach is huge, and I’m sure we’ll be safe. We are staying until Friday morning. The launch is currently rescheduled for “no sooner than THursday, 9:27pm”..... and Thursday night would be just fine with us. We are keeping our fingers crossed, and even without my zoom lenses (Waaaahhhh!!!) i should get some photos, at least i hope so.

No photos today of anything—although we did see some of the wild horses grazing in the marshes when we drove over to the island. So they ARE here, and we’ll see if we can get shots of them when the rain lets up.