Road Trip U.S.A. – Days 16 – 21

Day Sixteen

We departed early in the morning and drove to Norfolk, Virginia. We crossed over the Chesapeake Bay bridge/tunnel (blog post HERE).
We stopped for the day in Cambridge, Maryland. A very quaint town, just a pity the weather was a bit overcast. But the weather did not stop us walking to The High Spot for a couple of beers before heading to Jimmie and Sook’s for dinner. Dinner was good. Laura had crab, I had steak and oysters.

Day Seventeen

Now close to our final goal of New York City, we took it easy. We paid a visit to St. Michael, another quaint little village. I had planned to visit the winery there, but it did not open until 12noon. It was not a wasted journey, because we popped into the ? And picked up ?
The weather was not getting any better so we decided to carry on to Annapolis, which was our base for the night. A charming city even in the drab weather. Famished we had lunch at McGravey’s Oyster Bar and Saloon. We both ordered the same, a seafood club sandwich type thing, I can’t remember exactly, but it was a brioche roll with prawns, crab etc.
After lunch we had a quick look round the harbour, and a little more sightseeing before checked into our hotel.
Then it was a night on the tiles. We popped in to an Irish bar intending to stay for a couple of drinks, but as often happens we stayed much much longer. We got chatting to a local guy about various topics, but mainly we discussed photography. It was a really pleasant evening, apart from the fact that we were so busy talking and drinking we forgot to eat dinner. We remedied this with ice-cream, Laura had a chocolate orange cone, I had a cherry pie cone, from the ice-cream shop that claims to have been voted the best ice-cream in Annapolis for eight years running. It was indeed pretty good ice-cream.

Day Eighteen

After the night before, we decided to start the day with a decent breakfast at our hotel. I ordered a typical fry-up, egg, sausage etc. Laura chose English muffins topped with crab, egg, and béchamel sauce.
Breakfast scoffed we drove into the centre of Washington, D.C. (blog post HERE).
We left Washington and headed up the I95 to Harve De Grace where we spent the night in a highway motel.

Day Nineteen

We departed Harve De Grace nice and early and headed towards Atlantic City. We made one detour South to Cape May, a very picturesque little town. The weather was not brilliant, but we did set foot on the beach, even if it was only for about a minute. We then drove on to Atlantic City with a little detour to Stone Habor along the way.

Day Twenty

Happy Birthday to me.
Our Kodak camera needed replacing because it’s had a very hard life during our travels over the past 11 months (20,000 photos) and it also got a great deal of use when we lived in France.
After a bit of online research I decided to purchase a Nikon D3200. Buying the Nikon D3200 involved a bit of a drive, about a 3 hour round trip to Brick and back to Atlantic City.
It took 90 minutes to charge the camera battery, 90 minutes we spent having lunch. Battery charged, we paid a very brief visit to the marina which was right out the front of our hotel. We wanted to play with our new toy, so we fired off a few test shots. Happy Days.
Having a few days to spare before our camper-van (escape Campervans), was due to be returned, we decided to give any further touring a miss, so we booked an extra 3 nights at a hotel in New York City, on top of the three nights we already had booked, but at a different hotel. We thought we’d possibly do a little driving locally once we were in New York, and make use of the valet parking.

Day Twenty One

On the drive to New York City we changed our minds and decided not to keep the van, we were eager to be pedestrians again and get our legs moving with lots of much needed walking in Manhattan.
We phoned the rental company for the camper-van to arrange giving it back early.
Several phone calls, a couple of texts, and lots of sitting in very heavy slow moving traffic and we finally pulled up right outside our hotel. We were met by a guy on a skateboard who took possession of the camper-van. And so ended our road trip from Los Angeles to New York City.

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