In which Sid and Doris join the small number of Americans who know what, and where, the Delmarva peninsula is.
The East coast of the USA is a complicated jigsaw of islands and inlets. For those of us who think that the USA is approximately a rectangle with bits hanging off at the south-east (Florida) and south-west (California), we are missing quite a bit of detail down the right hand side. And in fact it turns out that many Americans also don’t get that detail, in particular a bit which is called the DelMarVa peninsula because it is partly in Delaware, partly in Maryland and partly in Virginia.
You may realise you know it if I say that between the Delmarva peninsula and the mainland is Chesapeake Bay, site of War of Independence naval actions which Sid would love to tell you about in detail, and nowadays containing a million billion little cute boats, wooden jetties, creeks and backwaters.
Joe and Betka are based on the Tred Avon river, which is a haven for wildlife and boaters. They built the house over the past few years, and already there are terrapins laying eggs on the carefully-restored beach, bluebirds nesting in the gutters and fireflies doing their stuff under the trees. Across the other side of the river is a big workboat laying new oyster beds, and once that departs in the evening the world is silent apart from the cicadas.
The climate is warm, the evenings are balmy, the water in the pool has naturally reached just the right temperature and it is difficult to understand how anyone ever gets any work done around here.
We have brought along a hamper full of equipment to recreate the Great British Bakeoff. Mary Berry’s favourite recipes are inspected carefully, and an afternoon of baking Battenburg cake, coconut pyramids and decorated Linzer biscuits follows. The equipment included a set of cookie cutters with a transport theme (car, boat, helicopter, plane etc) and as we have been watching Jeff Bezos’ first space journey Betka takes especial care to decorate the rocket-shaped cookies.
Towards the end of the afternoon, Joe suggests taking a taxi to get ice cream in the local town of Oxford. This is not just any taxi, it is a Ventian water taxi called Intermezzo, and a clear bid for Sid’s Conveyance of the day award.
Doris’s photographic skills are not up to the job of capturing the sheer beauty of Intermezzo, so after taking a couple of “we were there” pictures, we need to hand you over to the professionals in this article in Soundings magazine. Do click on the link, it tells you the story of this very interesting boat and also has some lovely pictures.
The boaty theme continues the next day with a visit to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St Michael’s to admire a lighthouse, some boat projects and also an (unfortunately unphotographed due to police discouragement) attempt to demolish a small wooden souvenir kiosk using a large SUV.
The final evening of the visit is a meal out in Oxford, this time using a Boston whaler.
Life is good.
