8/6/17, “The Eastern Shore”
En Route, Metro North, Harlem
Line
The similarities between tonight,
this trip as a whole, even, and two weeks ago are striking. Two new National Park Sites and a race back to
New York, up I-95, through brutal traffic, to get back to Scarsdale in time for
Game of Thrones and dinner from Chop Stix.
That is what happened today, and it was what happened two weeks ago
today. The next two Sundays will not be
dissimilar to that description, either.
That is what thus summer has become, a series of weekend
road trips to allow myself to say that I have been to every National Park Site
in the North Atlantic and Mid-Atlantic regions. However, they are all road trips, none of them by plane, and they will
all end the same way, with dinner from Chop Stix and watching Game of Thrones
in Scarsdale. It is entirely
coincidental that I came back from San Francisco the Monday before the premiere
and that I will be leaving for Hawaii the Friday after the finale, but it is
very fortunate that it worked out that way.
It has allowed me, forced me even, to stay grounded this summer, but
that has not stopped these road trips.
After I closed last night, I walked over to Annapolis Cigar Company,
where I stocked up on cigars. I lit up
an OpusX and met Raymond and Elaine outside.
His sister’s boyfriend and his friend were also there, both smoking
cigars. I insisted we go inside to take
a picture, of the four of us smoking our cigars in the lounge. Elaine waited outside. I enlisted a poor sap to take our picture,
and it came out great. The other three
went back outside, and I smoked in the lounge a bit before going back outside,
as Raymond and Elaine were spent, and they needed me to drive them back to
Edgewater. I smoked as we drove and left
the cigar out on the porch.
Raymond’s
brother and his girlfriend were at the house, and when they saw I had a
leftover crab, they made short work of it.
His girlfriend kept trying to feed me crab, but I kept insisting that
the only reason the crab was here in the first place was because I was full and
didn’t want the last crab. They were far
more skilled at extracting the crab meat than I was. I’ll take a crab cake or chowder any day over
food that requires that much work. I finished
my cigar and went to bed.
We were
supposed to be on the road at 7:30 AM. I
woke up at 7:52 AM. Neither Raymond nor
Elaine were downstairs. Fuck. It was about 8:15 AM by the time we got on
the road, and that had eaten up 45 minutes of my 2 hours of allocated Dutch
Time. I knew we would have at least an
hour of traffic. This was not good. We stopped in Annapolis for bagels and
coffee, which I knew would be easy to eat in the car. I got a honey whole wheat bagel with lox
spread, hoping, perhaps foolishlessly, that and a fiber bar later would last me
until dinner.
I lit up a Fuente, and we
headed straight to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical
Park VC (ain’t that a mouthful). To my
disappointment, the NHP was really just a historic area, rather than a
collection of historic sites. I did my
business at the VC, and asked the ranger with sarcasm that was missed, “Where’s
the train station?” The ranger explained
that the roads we drove in on were part of the Underground Railroad, which wasn’t
really a railroad. There were no real
historic sites in the NHP to see, but we could take a picture of the road from the
Legacy Garden.
After we took our
ceremonial picture, Raymond wanted to get pizza at a place he used to go as a
kid, and it was on the way. I thought he
would just grab a slice and get in the car, five minutes tops. It took 30 minutes. First, 20 minutes to cook the pizza, as,
apparently, outside of the NYC area, you can’t get precooked pizza, then he
insisted that they eat it there, rather than getting to go, which was another 10
minutes. I wasn’t hungry yet, so I had
to just watch them eat, annoyed, since we were now running very late, and I
wanted to be back on the road. I had
gotten coffee, so I sipped that and watched them eat.
I lit up a Graycliff, and we drove to the
Assateague Island VC for the National Seashore.
Being a beautiful summer Sunday, everything in the area was packed, and
the roads were slow. Our original schedule
had us leaving the National Seashore at noon to head to New York. We didn’t get to the VC until 12:45 PM. We would only have time to take a quick
ceremonial picture on the beach and turn around immediately. That’s what we did, and they were quite okay
with that, as Raymond’s childhood memories were from the Virginia portion of
the island and Elaine didn’t have proper beach shoes and had to be carried by
Raymond to take the ceremonial picture with me on the sand.
We were in the car at 1:15 PM, which meant we
only had 45 minutes of Dutch Time left.
I would need that just for my lunch, gas, and bathroom breaks. I knew we would be late. We were looking at a hard 6:30 PM arrival at
Hertz, best case scenario, which would let me take a 6:54 PM train back to
Scarsdale and have time for dinner and my entry before Game of Thrones. Any later than that, and I would have to
either write my entry on the train, as I am now doing, or after the
episode. I was also looking at a late
fee if we returned the car after 6:47 PM.
I had my RX Bar and an Aroma de Cuba (later followed by an Obsidian), and we were on our way. We stopped at a WaWa in Delaware for water and for my lunch at 4 PM
(buffalo chicken bites), and we stopped at a service plaza in New Jersey for
gas, me fuming about the absurd government regulations that mandate full
service gasoline in New Jersey, made worse by the sloth with which the workers filled
the car. We were now looking at a hard
6:40 PM arrival at Hertz.
Soon enough I
saw the familiar Manhattan skyline, but the traffic just kept getting worse. The Lincoln Tunnel was practically at a standstill,
less than 20 MPH. We got to Hertz around
6:55 PM, and, fortunately, they waived the late fee. We said our goodbyes, and I biked to my
apartment to drop off my clothes. The
train to Scarsdale was at 7:24 PM, and I was back at the bike racks outside my
apartment at 7:17 PM. It usually takes
me 5 minutes to bike up to Grand Central.
That would have been too slow. I
did it in 3.
I got my train ticket and
was on the train at 7:23 PM. Perfect
timing. I sat down and, once we were
underway, proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that I can
publish before we get to Scarsdale, along with closing out this trip. Next stop: another road trip to the
Mid-Atlantic, this time northern Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
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