Bridge and Birthday Dinner

Chesapeake Bay Bridge

 Friday, Oct. 2, 2020

We left Assateague Friday morning on a bright sunny day, sad to know that we would be missing the Anatares launch on Friday night, but heading for an even more special evening. Oct. 2 is our friend Howie’s birthday, and this year was a “big” one! In fact, we actually planned our trip around this weekend, because we wanted to help him celebrate.

We really enjoyed the drive through rural Maryland (we skirted the bottom corner of Delaware) and up along the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which crosses over to Annapolis. The traffic, which was pretty sparse in the early drive, picked up as we got closer to the bridge. I was a little bit afraid of it, because it is a VERY high bridge and was voted one of America’s “Ten Scariest Bridges” by Travel & Leisure Magazine. It is almost 200 feet in the air, and four miles long. There’s a company which charges $25 to drive people across when they are too afraid to drive their own cars!

However, we crossed with no problems, and I was able to enjoy the spectacular views while Joey did the driving.  (It’s funny to think that 2020 is the year we drove across both Chesapeake Bay bridges--this one, and the Bridge-Tunnel in Virginia, which goes from south of where we were camping down to Virginia Beach.) The traffic around Annapolis was a bit heavy, but all we needed to do was stay on our road for a while until we got to the Washington Beltway. Of course, THAT traffic was horrific. We went north around D.C. and back down the western side, which is usually a lot worse in my opinion than the east side, but we were heading to Reston, VA, just west of the beltway. The entire drive around D.C. was horrible, as always, and made worse by towing the Jeep, and by the fact that there was construction which narrowed the lanes.

When we got off the Beltway, we were still in a lot of construction, and not at all certain where we were going--we just had to follow our GPS and hope the directions were reasonable. One of the roads we were on was a narrow 2-lane road, going up and down like a roller coaster, and I wasn’t even sure it was the right road! But it was, and it brought us almost to the entrance of Lake Fairfax County Park, our destination for the weekend. We were very happy to find this park, because there is almost no place within Washington, DC to camp, and we were meeting up with Howie and his family at his daughter Laura’s home in Fairfax. This park was “only” about 25 minutes drive from there.

It turned out that the park is quite large, and has not only a campground with about 50 sites, but a huge water park, trails around the lake, boat rentals (closed for the season), sports fields, and even a skate park for skateboards.  We thought it was a real “find.” We stopped at the office to check in, and they were observing strict Covid protocols-- in one door, out the next, one person at a time. We checked in, and then went into the parking lot behind the office to unhook the Jeep before driving through the park. The directions and park map that the office guy gave me were a bit confusing, and with Joey following me in the Jeep, I was not sure where to go. I ended up pulling over and he scouted up ahead with the Jeep to make sure we were on the right road in the park. Then he came back and I followed him up to the campground.

We backed into our site with no trouble-- it was almost entirely flat (some were not--the campground was actually on the top of the hill) and got hooked up, and checked in with our friends. Dinner was planned for 6:00 pm, so we had a short time to recover from the traffic and check-in related stresses, and change our clothes, before we had to head towards Fairfax.  I wanted to stop at the garden store which was about a 1/4 mile from the park entrance (I wanted to take a house-gift to Laura) and THAT was a mistake-- to get to the store, we had to make a left turn onto yet another road with construction, and find a place to make a U-turn to get back, and then there was a Fall Festival happening at the garden store, with buses of kids and a jump-house and petting zoo... It delayed us about 45 minutes, I think! And then when we left, we immediately were back in traffic, on the roller-coaster road again, trying to get through rush-hour outside Washington, D.C. Our route included a small part of the Beltway yet again, and man, it was HORRIBLE. We also lost all our GPS on our phones duirng the trip (our phone batteries died), and we were quite relieved to get to Laura’s house in one piece.

We were greeted by Zeke, their yellow Lab, big hugs from Howie, and then more hugs once we got into the house. While dinner was being finished, I was given a full tour of their new house by Abigail, age 8.5 and a very informed tour-guide. Then we settled in for a wonderful steak dinner in the Sukkah (it was the first night of Sukkot, too) as we celebrated the holiday and Howie’s birthday. The entire evening was lovely, except the driving back to the RV part. We tried to take a different route this time, to avoid the Beltway, but we still ended up with traffic and construction. But we did end up safely back at the RV eventually, noticing that the sky was clear and that the rocket launch would have gone up into a beautiful warm sky. Joey and I, on the other hand, crashed into bed, exhausted from all the driving, and full of a wonderful dinner.