Ocean City, MD

We left Baltimore today (Friday) to spend the weekend on the Maryland coast in Ocean City. Picked up the camper and headed southeast. It has been almost five weeks since we put the camper in storage and have been living in comfort with a 42 inch flat screen, warm bed, always electricity and the Internet!! Both Andy and I were a little hesitant to hit the road; not sure we would remember how to "travel" this way. The ocean is about two-and-a-half hours from my daughters place, we had to go over two toll bridges charging us a fee of $9.00, then $12.00 to cross! Normal 2-axle-vehicles are charged only $2.00. Does that make sense?? We are staying in a real nice RV campground (half-off, the end of season rate) about 10 miles from Ocean City and its great boardwalk. We were here about 2 years ago and the place was much warmer and more crowded. As you can see by the pictures, the beach and boardwalk are empty. Many of the beach front hotels and shops are closed for the season. Actually, the beach itself was "closed". The concrete wall along the side of the walk way had gates blocking the entrance onto the sand. Last week this area got hit real hard from the "Atlantic Assault", a.k.a Hurricane Ida. Altho, those gates didn't stop us from climbing over and searching the coast for sea shells. There were no signs posted! And we needed the sea shells for my daughters beach wedding in April. We got over a half filled brown grocery bag of shells. Saving us about $20 if I were to buy them. And some of the snail shaped ones still any critters living in them!

Ocean City is a small resort town of about 7,000 people and has a 10-mile-long public beach, shops and small amusement park out on the pier. Tomorrow we are heading down to the National Sea Shore to look for those wild ponies on the beach.