Friends and Fire

August 14, 2013

The highlight of today is a visit to our boating buddies, Roxanne and Lennie, who we think of often, but have seen just once since we all finished the Great Loop.  They live in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, in a home with panoramic views of the marsh and Rehobeth Bay beyond.  We while away a few hours on their back deck, catching up on life after the Loop (like us, they have sold their boat and settled back into a landlubber life ashore).

Our lunch out on their back deck is the best meal of the trip--beginning with watermelon gazpacho, continuing with tasty crab cakes that Roxanne has made from a local restaurant recipe (no breadcrumbs to dilute the luscious taste of the crabmeat), and ending with killer chocolate brownies.   

All too soon it is time to hit the road again, and Roxanne sends us off with some of those tasty brownies for the road.  Although Dick has studied the map with Lenny, and discussed some good options for lollygagging our way down the coast, once we get driving and talking about options, we find we are both starting to feel a bit eager to get home. 

We end up deciding to stop just before the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, and by just before, I mean within half a mile of the toll booths.  The Sunset Beach Resort Hotel is decidedly shabby in all its public areas, and the wifi is not working, but we can’t bear the thought of getting back in the car and driving twenty miles across the bridges/through the tunnels to get to the other side and start looking for another hotel. (All the other hotels we have passed on unlucky Route 13 look even more grungy or are out of business--reminds us of Route 66.)

Our room is a pleasant surprise--extremely clean and nearly tasteful in its décor, with smooth sheets and fluffy towels.  Just as we are feeling relieved and reassured about our accommodations, Dick gets a disturbing phone call from our alarm company reporting that our attic heat sensor has gone off.  The fire department is on the way.  While visions of the house in flames dance in his head, he calls our friend Fred the fireman, who is getting paged to the alarm at our house at that very moment.  Fortunately, it turns out to be a false alarm, probably tripped by the severe storms that have been pelting our island for days. Fred gives us an on-site report on the action, and assures us that all is well at home.

We wander down to the Sunset Grille on the resort’s private beach.  It turns out to be the shabbiest looking amenity of the whole place--a shack that smells of cooking grease, precariously perched on a deck that is in danger of being swallowed by a sand dune. We grab a picnic table and order our meal, and once again we are surprised--the food is really good. 

And the sunset is excellent.

 

What a perfect ending to this day--the sky is on fire, and our house is not.