Mining the Diaries 80: USA 2011
1618 Lennox Park, 1400 E. W. Highway, Silver Spring, Maryland, 25th April 2011
Up at seven-thirty, showered, packed and sitting in the early sun on the veranda of the Atlantic Hotel waiting for Matthew and Kate. Commuter cars and pickups towing rattling trailers of mowers and gardening equipment rumbled by.
Curiously the hotel doesn’t do breakfast, so we had coffee and bagels round the corner at the Berlin Coffee Shop. A friendly place, light and airy with comfy sofas and country music, serving coffee (a range of beans), smoothies, teas, wraps and salads, and selling arts and crafts, maps, t-shirts (I bought one).
Checked out at the hotel and headed back north-west along the Ocean Gateway. We crossed Chesapeake Bay on the eponymous bridge (seven miles shore to shore, the first span built in 1952, a second added in 1973) and stopped at Sandy Point State Park. It’s a family place: the green parkland runs down to the shore of golden sand, which is popular for swimming; tables are set up with built-in barbecues; and there are covered communal party areas for parties of up to 300 people. We walked through pines and out to the Point where boulders have been laid to reduce erosion. The traffic noise from the bridge, especially the huge trucks, was intrusive though it didn’t seem to bother the osprey’s quartering the Bay.
On to Annapolis and Cantler’s Riverside Inn for a Maryland-style lunch cracking crabs and watching ospreys floating languidly over Mill Creek. Here seeing ospreys is not a cause for excitement.