Touring Annapolis and the Eastern Shore
Trip Start
Jul 21, 2001
1
23
45
Trip End
Apr 22, 2002
Annapolis,
Maryland,
United States
Monday, October 15, 2001
Mill Creek is our home base for the next few days thanks to Arden and Linni Weiss. A few short hours after our arrival a call to the Captain of Mystic Loon was heard. For the first time, we meet our gracious host.
Arden is a man after my own heart. Although his wife wasn't home from work, when he heard I wanted to see the Boat Show, his first reaction was let's go!!! I had read about the Annapolis Boat Show for years and coming south the only date I had set was a week earlier when the Sailboat Show was in town. Unfortunately, being a week late we would never make that show but the Power Boat Show was in full gear. Jim and Joanne Bousquet, from Little Current had attended this show a few years earlier and I recalled Jim's enthusiasm about the show. Power not Sail, who cares, let's see this event.
There is absolutely no parking close to the event so Arden's son Scott drove us downtown and dropped us off. I was able to purchase the Boat US unlimited Tow-Boat insurance with 20% off. I figured that with our past experiences this might be our next challenge. We now have insurance for everything except CAT INSURANCE. :-) Readers of past web site postings have read of my desire to consider a trawler. Arden and I went aboard a beautiful Grand Banks trawler. We quickly got off when I found that the price was 3/4 of a million dollars US. Okay, let's think smaller. We went aboard a 30 foot tugboat. What a cute little boat. Margaret could live on this one. Okay, what's the boat show sale price - $235,000 US. GOODBYE!!!
Many of the people we meet heading south on beautiful boats have sold their homes and carry a large mortgage on their boat. Our boat may be one of the smaller ones going south but at least it has been paid for long ago and we always have a home to go to if all else fails. At least that's my rationalization. :-)
The Boat Show is a remarkable event. They add several thousand feet of dock and pier space for the two shows and the day it is over they start removing the piers. We don't even comprehend how they could shoehorn all these boats into the space provided. The overall coordinator has an awesome job.
Back home we shared stories of adventures but ours were nothing compared to the years Arden worked as an engineer in Yugoslavia and then Swaziland and Linni did volunteer work with the native communities.
Oct. 13
After sleeping in for a change, we enjoyed a slow start to a day of sightseeing in the capital of the United States. No, not Washington DC - Annapolis. The charter of 1708 makes Annapolis one of the oldest cities in America. In 1783 and 1784, Congress assembled in Annapolis, making it the first peacetime capital of the United States. Our first stop was the Annapolis Naval Academy. Everyone entering the grounds, even cadets in uniform, had to provide a photo id (for example our driver's license).
One of the highlights of our tour of the grounds was a stop at the Naval Museum. There are four galleries totalling 12,00 square feet. The main gallery displays the history of the American Navy, from the Revolutionary War through Korea and Vietnam. The floor I found most interesting was the ground floor which hosts the "Gallery of Ship Models". This floor includes "108 ship and boat models of sailing ships dating from 1650 to 1850. It contains scale models built for the British Admiralty and original display cabinets from the 17th century. A number of years ago, Margaret bought me a scale model kit of The Bluenose. I completed the hull but the remainder has just been sitting waiting to be completed. After seeing these beautiful models, the urge has returned to see the Bluenose through to completion when we return home next May.
We had to drive through West Point but now we were able to stroll through the grounds of the Academy. One area of interest was the officers' boulevard of homes all decorated for an early Halloween.
Stopping at the Academy's Ship Store, I bought the obligatory Navy sweatshirt and cap and then we proceeded to tour the downtown area. Linni proved to be an outstanding guide as she once owned a shop in the downtown area and her father had been deeply involved in the politics and educational institutions of Annapolis. The area is still quite reminiscent of an 18th century seaport. Linni showed us the square where slaves were auctioned off. In the series, "Roots" Kunta Kinte was auctioned here when his ship arrived in America. The streets are made of old brick and the stores reminded us of the wonderful, unique stores in Petosky, Michigan.
Oct. 14
On Sunday, we had a choice of touring Washington, DC, Baltimore or the laid back, sedate villages of the eastern Chesapeake. We immediately chose the last option. During our trip across Lake Ontario and during the long hours of motoring through the Erie Canal Margaret and I both had time to complete James A. Michener's 1083 page opus "Chesapeake". Michener spent two years living in the Choptank River area researching his book. We had underlined many passages and dog-eared the pages so we could return to the setting of this magnificently written novel. We had intended spending three weeks sailing the waters of the Chesapeake, especially its eastern shore, but the delays have used up all these weeks. Today's trip would bring the book and its history alive.
Our first stop was the village of St. Michaels. For anyone with time, this must be close to the perfect place to sail to. Sailing past numerous rivers the guide book describes the following scene: "big old houses, many dating back to colonial days, stand on its banks, greeting the visitor at every turn. Fields of grain roll down to the water's edge. Watermen putter around in wooden boats, trotlining for crabs. All is serene with an air of suspended time - as if nothing had changed in 200 years." Even driving through this area was a slower paced experience. On Manitoulin, signs indicating deer crossings are a familiar sight. Here we found a duck crossing sign near a small bridge.
At St. Michael's we enjoyed touring the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum learning about the life so vividly portrayed by Michener and still practiced today by the descendants of the watermen and hunters of the Eastern Shore. We saw how to pull an eel pot, catch some blue crabs and tong for oysters.
Linni among her many talents does interior design work. We stopped to see a house she had been commissioned to do. The owner had recently declined fifteen million so you can imagine what type of home we were looking at.
Next a ferry took us to the town of Oxford on the Tred Avon River. We stopped for lunch at the Robert Morris Inn. This was the home of Robert Morris Jr. "The Financier of the American Revolution" and one of America's founding fathers. He was considered to be the first of the three great treasury secretaries who laid the financial foundations of the United States.
To describe some of what we saw I'll quote from their brochure: "The original flooring in the upstairs hall is Georgia white pine. The nails were hand made, and the 14 inch square beams and pilasters were fastened with hand hewn oak pegs. The impressive murals in the dining room were made from wallpaper samples used by manufacturers' salesmen 140 years ago and were printed on a screw-type press using 1600 woodcut blocks carved from orangewood. In 1962, during the redecoration of the White House, Mrs. John F. Kennedy found the original wallpaper of this design in an historic home in western Maryland, had the paper removed and placed on the walls of the White House reception room. Complimenting the fine woodwork of this room is a hand-carved log canoe under sail. The Riverview Room, just off the reception hall has 280 year old wood pegged wall panels and a fireplace of bricks made in England around 1812." This was the Inn which Michener often dined in during his stay and raved about having them serving the best crab cakes he had ever tasted. Unfortunately after enjoying Chesapeake's famous Blue Crab in the form of crab cakes, crab balls and cream of crab soup in St. Michael's we had enough crab to last us for some time to come.
Some of Michener's main characters are Quakers and he described their struggles and their influence in the area. Mainly known to others for their belief in "a non-violent and peaceful approach to the solution of social problems" the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were the first group in America to publically speak against the practice of slavery. Michener also writes of the building of the first church and we were curious to see how much poetic license he had taken in describing the building and surrounding woods. When we mentioned this to Linni and Arden, imagine our surprise to learn that Linni was a member of this faith and would be delighted to take us to this famous meeting house in Easton.
One approaches the meeting house by driving down a long lane of towering trees. There amongst the trees is a smallish house of worship which seemed to be part of the forest. It gave proof of what could be accomplished even in a wilderness by simple workmen." This was the Third Haven Meeting House of the Society of Friends 1682-1684, one of the oldest frame houses of worship in the United States and the oldest in continuous use since it was built. It was our good fortune that the caretaker was outside at the time and she spent the next half hour answering our questions about the history of the building and the work of the Society.
We have been in some of Europe's magnificent cathedrals in Venice, Florence and Paris (see our European pages in this web site) but this simple church with it's austere but dignified oak benches, lent a peace and an awe that left one moved in a much more personal way.
We had seen posters along the way of a Legion fish supper. On Manitoulin, our local Legion has a Friday evening barbeque and we expected much the same type of supper. Instead we found a wonderful open air gathering with a band and a wide variety of fare: fish, oysters, beef and pastas.
I'd like to thank Gus Wedin, Adjutant of the Benedict A. Andrew American Legion Post # 296 for being such a gracious host. Hearing we were from a Canadian Legion, he returned our admission so on behalf of our Royal Canadian Legion Branch 177, we gave the money back as a donation to their Youth Program and our legion's name is now entered in their records.
Oct. 15
With strong winds finally from the north to speed us down Chesapeake Bay, it was with sadness that we said goodby to the Weiss family and the peace of their dock. We took with us beautiful gifts and lasting memories of our time in Annapolis with strangers who so quickly became friends. Thank you ever so much for your incredible hospitality.
