Second Day of the Getaway

It's past midnight but I want to get at least the basics down while the other computer is uploading videos to YouTube.

The second day of our unscheduled getaway went very well. We got off to a late start, after sleeping in, but then began with the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland, an old favorite of Sarah's and ours, which had opened a new Paleontology exhibit since our last visit, not to mention that they now have an "eco-invaders" exhibit including the infamous snakehead, first found just a few years ago in the Potomac. It is, as Sarah noted, "Uhhhhhgggllyyyyy." I hope that gets the pronunciation across.

We saw a snake in the water, visited the otters and other residents of the place, saw some tracks in the mud of raccoons and herons and other stuff, Sarah got a fossil shark's tooth from the "find a fossil" exhibit and we decided to go look for real fossils later on the beach.

In the gift shop/bookstore we went a little overboard. I bought some books, bought Tam as an anniversary present a little thing for one of the bathrooms, and splurged and bought Sarah a lovely enameled butterfly jewel box she fell in love with, after making her swear that she would treat it carefully, not play with it, etc. So far only half successful but at least it isn't broken yet.

From there we went into Solomon's Island, just adjacent to Solomons and on an island, if you couldn't figure that part out already, an old oystering town, now mostly for tourists, only an hour or so out of DC. We ate at Stoney's Kingfishers, a crab house on the water, and had crab cake sandwiches (except for one of us who had Kraft Mac and Cheese. Guess which one). A splurge but worth it. Then across the street to an ice cream stand on the boardwalk adjacent to a playground and called (sorry) Cone Island, which Sarah has known since she was a toddler and is a de rigeur stop in season on Solomon's Island.

Having already discussed several options for the afternoon (none of them going home and getting work done), including a sail on a cruise on the Bay, and looking for real fossils on a real beach, we decided on the latter, and for the first time visited Flag Ponds Nature Park in Calvert County Maryland. It's just a little north of the Calvert Cliffs State Park, famous for its strata of fossils that erode out onto the beach, but a specialist at the Calvert Marine Museum told us that the beach was much easier to get to than at Calvert Cliffs. It's also just north of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, I believe the only nuclear plant in Maryland. It was visible from the beach.

The beach was relatively empty and, if you check our YouTube videos, quite nice; besides lots of seashells there are a lot of fossils to be found. We got there late on a Sunday when it was presumably picked over, but found several pieces of coral, and my immediate thought was, "Coral? We don't have Coral in the Chesapeake." So I asked a conservationist/ranger (or whatever) and he said no, it's old. "Is it a fossil." "Getting there." "How old do you think?" "A couple of million years." That seems a bit young for these supposedly Miocene cliffs, but it's old enough for me. (It's older than me, and these days that itself feels like an accomplishment.)

By the end of this I was tired, sore, and ready to go home, so we did. But we were grateful that we got away. I'm uploading the videos now, the first on YouTube since the fourth of July (never have put together the vacation videos). Forgive. Till I got the new laptop I had real trouble editing video on the road, and am too busy at home. If you're close kin and aren't yet accessing our YouTube and Flickr accounts send me an e-mail and I'll invite you again. It's free. Either tonight or tomorrow (depending on how slow the upload is as it's late and I need sleep) there will be five [COUNT THEM: 5] new videos on YouTube. Some new stuff at Flickr too.

UPDATE: A very late addendum. As uploading was taking longer than I hoped, I did it double-barreled, using two computers on the same broadband link. One result was that two of the shorter videos from today went up in reverse order: the "Calvert Marine Museum" video comes chronologically just before the "Family Time on the Bay" video. In the greater scheme of things, this probably does not rank with whether the Trojan War occurred (a question Sarah asked this weekend, which I answered with discussions of the recent German discoveries of the upper city of Troy VIIA, which was not a third grade answer) or certain other issues. But for the record, "Calvert" came before family time, not after.

Check it out.

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