Day 2, Part 1

Woke up at a reasonable hour and made coffee. The security guard, who had been plied with treats by some of the girls before bedtime, had gone. Had some breakfast and then went down to wrangle a group headed for paintball. Once they'd left, I asked who wanted to join me for the secondary activity of bike riding. As it turned out, only one girl and I were up for going.

We were going to ride on the bus with the paintball group, but the bus driver had apparently been subjected to some sort of operant conditioning that caused him to twitch uncontrollably if I asked him to stop the bus anywhere other than the appointed place. Rather than have a twitchy bus driver, we elected to take a city bus, which took approximately 45 seconds longer, since the charter bus passed us right before our stop.

We rented mountain bikes, which is peculiar in that there's nothing around Ocean City that would remotely qualify as a hill, much less a mountain, but off we went. My idea was to ride at least far enough north that we got into Delaware.

Ocean City has an unusual kind of arrangement where there is one lane that is a combination bus and bike lane. It sound kind of scary, at least from the bike perspective, but since there's only one bus every 10 minutes or so, it was fine.

After we'd ridden for a while, my companion asked if I knew how far it was to Delaware, at which point we spotted a "Welcome To Delaware" sign. It was an interesting shift, because once we passed the initial commercial area (I guess for people seeking non sales tax) it turned into a state park and there was nothing on either side but sand dunes. And bikes got their own lane. Absolutely lovely. Eventually we decided it was time to turn around.

I'm a pretty experienced cyclist, and you'd think by now I'd have internalized one important fact- if there's no breeze in your face while you're riding, it means the wind is at your back. And will therefore be in your face when you turn around, and that's what it was. But we fought our way and were very ready for lunch when we returned.

The afternoon was spent at the beach. It wasn't as hot today, but very sunny and nice. The kids built and smashed sand castles and and threw a football around when the beach patrol wasn't watching and fought the rough surf. Then back inside to shower and ice skate a bit before dinner.

We're now on our way to see the Delmarva Shorebirds face off against the Hickory Crawdads in a South Atlantic League (affectionately known as the Sally League) contest. It's low class A ball, mostly 19 and 20 year-old kids. Should be fun and I'll report back later.