close to home yet far away
Looking back at the spring and summer of 2020, which was such a strange and frightening time…
By the end of that summer, with both of our college-age offspring involved with their academic work (one living on campus and one doing her senior year totally online), my husband and I decided to go on a pandemic-safe vacation.
Obviously, flying was out. Ditto big cities and any place with lots of people. That left a driving trip to a place with a variety of outside activities and not too many people. Luckily, our home state of Virginia has many options. We decided to go to the beach and not just Virginia Beach, but the beaches of the Eastern Shore — specifically, Chincoteague. Surprisingly, even though I have lived in Virginia all my life, I had never been to Chincoteague.
Chincoteague is an island off the Eastern Shore and the town is small and charming — it’s not filled with high-rise hotels crowded along the water. The beach that everyone talks about — and where the wild ponies live — is Assateague Island, a barrier island that is a designated national seashore. Assateague is wild and largely undeveloped, with only a couple of beaches accessible by car and a few more that are accessible by bike or walking.
We went in late September, which is most definitely the off-season — it was very quiet and some businesses had already closed for the year. We rented a condo and brought our bikes so that we could park our car and get around solely on two wheels. In 10 days we drove only once and racked up 10-15 miles on our bikes every day. It was glorious and exactly what we needed.
We live in central Virginia and the drive from here to Chincoteague is almost five hours. Since most of our day trips within the state are two hours or less, I sometimes forget how wide Virginia is. In the other direction, the drive to the southwest corner and the Tennessee border is more than four hours.
Because we tend to focus on either trips abroad or domestic trips that involve a long flight, in my mind, we were FAR away from home. So much so that at one point on that trip I started mentally calculating the time difference between where we were in Virginia and where our two college-aged offspring, also in Virginia, were.
I know, I know. Pretty silly.
For all of the terrible things that happened in the U.S. in 2020, that trip was one tiny good thing. We would never have vacationed on the Eastern Shore if not for this vacation. We enjoyed it so much that we went back a year later.
And I am so glad we finally explored this corner of our home state that was completely new to us.
Have you found interesting and unexpected places where you live?
Like you, we used that strange time to explore close to home. In our case very close - parts of our own cities we’d never been to before. And it became a habit that’s stayed with us, as we discovered some lovely spots literally within walking distance of our front door. Some tunes good things come from bad.
I always wanted to make it over to the eastern shore but we never did. Someday. Maybe.