It’s been an eventful couple of weeks in Maryland and Virginia leading up to our departure ‘Out West’. We plan to spend the winter in Arizona again this year. In fact, we will be staying at Palm Creek Golf & Resort in Casa Grande, Arizona for four months. Last year we stayed three months however Palm Creek was running a special and offered a discount if you stayed one more month this year than you did last year…. well twist my arm – I’m in!
We have been at the Rambling Pines Campground for the last month or so, tucked into a very nice & fairly secluded wooded site. Over our last weekend in Maryland we enjoyed taking the girls to Medieval Times, which is located in the Arundel Mills Mall. This is an indoor Renaissance Dinner Theatre where you enjoy watching knights on horseback joust and ‘do battle’ while you eat dinner. The lighting is a little tricky however I was able to get a shot or two.
Mary Lynn and the girls have wanted to do this for awhile however I’ve always balked at paying $63 a person for a ‘chicken dinner covered in sawdust’ from the arena.
Wouldn’t you know Medieval Times offered tickets at only $25 dollars per person & promised to keep the sawdust to a minimum… In any case, we all enjoyed ourselves. They even have a small display of medieval torture devices which I found interesting although troubling. You can’t help contemplating man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.
MLA & the girls had no such problems – they quickly skipped out of the dungeon display and went off to enjoy shopping at one of Maryland’s largest malls – leaving me to ponder how we humans could at times be so cruel to each other.
Mary Lynn’s mom’s surgery went well and we moved her back to her own house on Tuesday, October 19. We drove the motor home across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to her home in Greenbackville, Virginia. This is located just outside of Chincoteague, Virginia where our good friends Patty & Craig live. As always, it was great seeing them last night before we ‘headed west’ this morning.
Today we left MLA’s mom’s house and headed south across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel. This 27 mile long bridge crosses the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay with two short a tunnels that burrow under the bay to allow ships in and out of the bay.
Quite an unusual feeling to drive down into a tunnel knowing there is enough water above you for an aircraft carrier and/or cruise ship to pass over you heads. I’m not kidding – Newport News is home to several ship building companies and a naval base or two. Lots of destroyers, submarines and an occasional aircraft carrier are stationed here.
The tunnels are narrow with one lane of traffic in each direction. Very exciting when the oncoming traffic includes a large percentage of semi trucks. All the drivers of big rigs ‘hug the center double line’ to keep away from the tunnel walls & railings which in turn means our driver’s side mirrors end up competing for the same ‘air space’. As I said, very exciting. Thankfully the tunnels are short and we managed to pass a number of oncoming semi’s & other RV’s without incident. Not difficult just took a lot of concentration.
We skirted along the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Area on Virginia State Road 58 and then stopped to buy a Virginia Country ham. Virginia Country Hams, sometimes called Smithfield Hams, are famous in these parts. They are salt cured – and come to find out – need a fair amount of preparation and cooking. But that is a story for another time.
Not knowing what was required to properly prepare and cook the ham we thought buying one of these hams was a great idea…
When we left Mary Lynn’s mom’s house early in the day we had planned to stop in Greensboro, NC to visit with our good friends Jack and Kathy. Well it turns out there was some special event happening in the Greensboro area that weekend and there were no RV campsites within 100 miles. Regrettably we passed through Greensboro and ended up in Charlotte, NC. We’ll have to catch up with Jack and Kathy next time…
See Ya!
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