A gray day on the road

Saturday, September 14th.
Exterior.
Night has fallen on the Lums Pond State Park campground in northern Delaware. The trusty Ford Club Wagon is parked under a tree on the outer perimiter of the campground. Its inhabitants have retired to their sleeping quarters early to allow time for logging recent adventures of their trip. An amber glow from the warm coals outside their van bear witness of their first attempt at a "homecooked dinner".

Today we woke up at a comfortable hour and, after performing our morning rituals, headed right back in the direction of the mall we'd been at the night before. On the way home from the movie theater we'd spotted... a Goodwill Superstore! :) Well, that was an opportunity we wouldn't pass up. So we spent the remaining few hours of the morning there. Jens bought so much stuff that he received a Preferred Member rebate card! :)

After a combined breakfast and lunch at Wendy's we got on the Baltimore Beltway for some monotonous interstate driving to get around the city. Highway 40, which we started out on, actually runs straight through the city, but we'd experienced all its potholes and hectic traffic the day before, so we opted for the Beltway this time. We were headed towards Chesapeake Bay in the hope of finding a nice campground by the beach where we could camp out for another nice "day off".

The nice sunny weather that we'd experienced in D.C. seemed to have worn off during the night. We drove all day under a solid gray sky. But we made it out to the bay! After shopping for supplies at a Food Lion along the way we drove down an isthmus to Elk Neck State Park to check out their campsites. The sites actually weren't bad, but we were disheartened by the overcast day and decided that we hadn't really found the coastal campout that we were looking for. So we got back on the highway and crossed the border to Delaware and found our way to Lums Pond State park.

We've spent our evening here playing catch in the field next to our campsite and preparing our first somewhat homecooked dinner. All of the campsites we've stayed at in Virginia and Maryland have been under a fire ban because of the drought conditions. Apparantly this does not apply in Delaware. So we built ourselves a pretty good little campfire and fixed our dinner from store-bought Turkey Franks and hot dog buns. The preparation of the food was more fun that the consumption of it, let's put it that way. The turkey franks and buns were just too reminiscent of our Wonder Bread cheddar & turkey sandwiches to be truly enjoyable. But it was filling enough, and we felt like real frontiersmen, having built our own fire and cooked our own food. That we'd caught with our own hands... at Food Lion :)