Month: October 2016

On the Road Again

 

Sorry it has been so long since my last post.  I have been very busy AND I need a new more portable laptop (working on it).  I also have been busy helping to raise some money for a friend in Savannah who lost her house in the hurricane.

After the OC Bikefest, we flew back to Ohio so Kirk could work for a few weeks…gotta fund the fun….but soon it was time to head out again.  We booked a flight on Friday from Cleveland into Salisbury, Maryland.  The plan was to get in around 5pm and have a yummy seafood dinner with family, spend the night and then head out towards Charlotte, NC on Saturday morning.  As usual, nothing goes as planned.

Our flight out of Cleveland was delayed so we wouldn’t be able to make our connecting flight in Philadelphia.  They rescheduled us for a later connecting flight which still wouldn’t have been bad…but….when we arrived in Philly, that flight was delayed too.

We avoided the bar at the airport that had the iPads at every table.  I thought it was a cool concept, but the last time we flew through there, we ate there and I thought Kirk was going to throw the iPad across the room.  He is not very good with technology and got so frustrated at having to order on the iPad and then having to watch a commercial after you order.  He was so upset that time, I know his blood pressure was going through the roof.  SO…this time we just avoided the place.  We ended up getting to Salisbury around 9:30 pm.  It was a long day and our yummy seafood dinner became a stop at Taco Bell.

We got a good night’s sleep and got up refreshed and ready to go on Saturday morning.  We packed up the bags and headed out to get the bike loaded up.  Of course, it started raining.  We threw on rain gear.  I still don’t have rain pants, so I put on a rain jacket and hoped that it would stop raining soon.  Luckily it wasn’t a huge downpour, it was just a steady medium rain.

We headed down the road to meet up with Kirk’s Great Aunt June, cousin Shaun, his late mother’s best friend, Rosemary and her husband Johnny for lunch.  Along the way we passed the house that his great-grandparents lived in when he was little.  It was a trip down memory lane!

The tables in Rita’s restaurant had old pictures of local people on them under glass.  We happened to be sitting at a table with his Aunt June’s picture from high school.

After a nice long visit and meal at the restaurant, we put our shoes and socks back on (we both had taken our boots and socks off, rung them out, and hung them out to dry on the chairs..lol) and we were back on our way towards the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Thank goodness the rain had moved on and the sun was out (well, sort of).

We stopped at the rest stop on the bridge and took in the sights before hitting the road again.  Yes, there is a rest stop on the bridge. One cool thing that we saw was the USS George Washington returning from deployment.  The men were manning the rail.  It was quite a site.  The pictures don’t do it justice. We didn’t have too far left to go.  We were only going to Emporia, Virginia and then stop for the night.

We made it to our hotel without any problems, dried out our boots the rest of the way and had a good night’s rest.

 

OC Bikefest

We woke up tired and moved slowly getting ready.  Kirk of course was happy because he got more scrapple. (How he eats that stuff I will never know.)  Once we got things ready, we headed to the coast in Delaware and followed it along until we got to Ocean City, Maryland for the festivities.

We started out at the convention center and checked out all of the vendors there.

It was way too hot on the pavement there so we headed to a restaurant for some air conditioning and food.  When we were rested and fed, we rode over to the pier to check out what was going on there.

It was a little bit of a mess.  The website said that you would have to pay 20 bucks to park there unless you had the weekend event pass, but I believe that it was such a confused mess that they decided not to charge anyone anything.  We went where we were directed and the people directing the traffic in the parking lot were at odds about where we were to go and things were very crazy.  We finally found a place to park and headed into the venue area.  I have to say, I was not impressed.

I have been to several bike events and this one was probably my least favorite.  There were not very many vendors and the area was small. We walked around a bit and of course Kirk had to go and get some famous Thrasher’s Boardwalk Fries (soaked in vinegar of course).

We saw some interesting sites and things.

We watched the Three Doors Down concert, which I was excited about, then it was time to go.  They closed down the pier area at 9pm and everyone had to get on their bikes and go which was crazy. We did manage to find some new low profile, DOT approved helmets, so that was a good thing.

When we had to leave the pier, we stopped at a place called  Fish Tales. We met up with Kirk’s cousin there and had some dinner and a few drinks. (They did have a few vendors there too)wp-1475262018062.jpg

When we were done for the night, we headed back to Delaware and stopped at a crazy bar that apparently during the day, for bike week, had midget gator wrestling and midget paintball.  You actually shoot a paintball gun at a midget while he runs around and tries to hide behind different objects, after he wrestled an alligator.  Needless to say, the media criticized them over these politically incorrect events. We didn’t stay long. It had been a long day (and the place was weird.)

All in all, I would go back to Ocean City, maybe even during bike fest, but I wouldn’t pay the fee to get into the specialized area.