After my visit to Old Conrad's grave, I got back on the main highway and headed back to Harrisburg, passing through Hershey on a blistering hot afternoon. As I passed the famous factory, all I could think about was all that delicious chocolate melting on the highway.
Harrisburg was a mess of afternoon traffic, and I was relieved to finally get on the sideroads along the river that led southward into Maryland. I had thought that the best river scenery was behind me at this point, but I was wrong. As it cuts through the rolling hills of this area, the river nevertheless gouges a beautiful ancient canyon that furnishes some awesome overlooks. I was particularly impressed by the town of Columbia, Pa., which, according to a historical plaque there, came within one vote in Congress of becoming the national capital.
Near the Maryland border, the river passes through an area of crazily fractured rock formations called the Indian Steps. Out west this would probably be a national park.
As the sun was setting, I finally crossed the famous Mason-Dixon line into Maryland, where the river almost immediately jetisons itself into the northern end of Chesapeake Bay. I stopped into the town of Perry at the mouth and took some pictures as the sun set, standing beside a colonial inn that was a favorite of George Washington when he passed through this area on the way to Philadelphia and New York.
There was just enough sunlight left in the day to stop in the touristy town of North East for some groceries, and then to make it to Elk Neck State Park to find a campsite. In Maryland, I discovered, they demand your ID and run in through some computer system, I think. The printer was down and it was about twenty minutes for the ranger to finally print out my camp pass and let me into the park, for the princely sum of twenty-seven bucks.
It wouldn't have been so bad, but it turns out the bathrooms, and the park as whole, were infested with all manner of spiders. It took me over a week to recover from the bites I received there. Moreover, there were frequent ranger patrols in the campround, and perhaps because I checked in late, the ranger kept stopping at my site to eye me suspiciously in the dark. I was glad this was the last night of camping for this leg of the trip.
In the morning I woke to a scenic view of the Elk River, which is just an estuarial inlet off the Chesapeake. I learned from a historical marker that this is where the British fleet landed to unload the army to attack Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
It was a cloudy but muggy day. I meandered down the Delmarva Peninsula, stopping in the town of Chesapeake City, Md., which is not really on the bay of the name, but is rather on the old Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. I paid a very splendid visit to the free canal museum run by the Army Corps of Engineers, and learned that the canal was first proposed in the late Seventeenth Century.
In the afternoon, I travelled through the flat farmlands of the eastern shore of Maryland, winding down until I got to Kent Island, where I crossed the bay on the mighty Bay Bridge for the first time ever. This landed me in Annapolis, where I toured the Maryland state capitol (of course).
Maryland's capitol is very different than Pennsylvania. As the oldest continually functioning statehouse in the country, it is tiny by contemporary standards, and rather inconspicuous in the center of town. Of course it is charming and quaint in a colonial way.
Annapolis had some fun memories for me. Twenty-six years ago, when I was a freshman at Georgetown, I borrowed a friend's bicycle and took over on a Saturday night, traveling all night from DC to Annapolis on the backroads. It was perhaps the opening act in a long series of crazy travels, and was something I wouldn't dream of doing today.
But it was a powerful experience, and I still remember coming over the bridge south of town as the sun rose on Sunday morning. This visit, I had to negotiate crummy post-work traffic, but I managed to make it back to the same bridge, for sentimental reasons. I noticed that the area around it has built quite built up over the last few decades.
As the afternoon grew long and hot, I left the site of my old memory and zigzagged through the backroads of rural Maryland until I at last got to my destination---the house (and artists studio) of my friend Howard in Silver Spring, just north of DC. He lives there with his girlfriend Mia and her brother Seth. I'd visited them last Halloween, on my way to New England, and thus this was a return visit as I went back west. It was good to see them again, and good to be off the road for the first time in two weeks.
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