Chincoteague

One of the challenges with being a wildly popular blogger is that sometimes your fans come up to you on the street and beg you to write about their favorite subjects. This happened to me most recently at Columbia Island when one of my biggest fans asked me to write about my recent trip to Chincoteague.

The origin of this trip really goes back to 2014 when I was part of group trip to Chincoteague. This led to a return to Chincoteague, this time with spouses, in 2016. That trip was a lot of fun for just about everyone - though not so much so for Valerie, whose mom was fatally ill (she died just days after the trip). Still, the experience of getting everyone including significant others together was so enjoyable that we vowed to do it again. Life got in the way for a while, but I eventually orchestrated a follow-on group get-together, this one a combination of paddling and bluegrass music at Claytor Lake/Floyd, VA. At the end of that trip we started thinking about the next follow-on and decided it would be a return to Chincoteague, this time all squeezing into Jim G's house there. Which brings us to the present trip.

Jim had long talked about his house in Chincoteague, but in his self-deprecating way had described it as being quite modest. Valerie and I rolled up on Friday to discover that it was, in fact, a spacious and lovely farmhouse, tastefully decorated in a style that combined farmhouse and seashore styles (you can see it here). Valerie and I were the first after Jim to arrive - which gave us first crack at choice of bedrooms, something of value since the group was pushing the capacity of the house. Jim headed off to paddle while Valerie and I settled in after our long drive, venturing only as far as downtown Chincoteague a few blocks away where we got lunch and shopped at a gourmet sandwich shop.

Others soon began arriving. Rob and Barb arrived all excited about the pony penning that was apparently going on that weekend. This is not the big pony swim and auction - that's in July. Rather, in the spring and fall the "saltwater cowboys" of Assateague round up ponies to do a health check and identify any new foals.

Here come some ponies

Valerie chose to hang back at the house while Rob, Barb and I headed over to check out the pony event. Thanks to Misty of Chincoteague, the wild ponies of Assateague/Chincoteague are nationally famous and the event drew spectators from all over. Some people next to us had driven in from the mid-west (I forget where - all those mid-west states are kinda the same). There were pony junkies who could identify individual horses in the herd, maybe from studying web sites such as this one, which has individual pictures of ponies along with their names.

Ponies in the pen

It was one of those events that was fun because it was an event. I'm not a pony junkie, and standing around waiting for the cowboys to occasionally drive some horses into the pen wasn't all that interesting, but the air of excitement and the energy of the spectator group made it a fun, celebratory event. Eventually the event wound down and we headed back to the house, stopping along the way at the well-regarded Island Creamery for some awesome ice cream (so awesome that I had seconds - which is two more servings of ice cream than I usually allow myself).

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Dinner

Chilling out

Saturday, Kathy arrived, having set out super-early from DC. When it came time to head out for the day's activities we split into kayaking and non-kayaking groups. The non-paddling group strolled downtown, fetishized yarn, visited the beach, napped, and such. The kayakers headed to the launch at the southern end of the island at the end of Main Street. In previous years we had first dutifully stopped downtown to buy launch permits, but this time our Jim told us we didn't need them (signs to the contrary) and so we skipped this step. The wind had settled a little from Friday's gusty weather, but the residual wind combined with the tides made for somewhat slow going as we paddled across towards Assateague Island. We stopped several times to make sure everyone was OK, each time losing considerable ground as the wind and current pushed us back in the direction we had come. Finally, we all agreed that we were going to go looking for ponies and then dip into Tom's Cove. Alas, there were no ponies to be found - I suspect that they were all either penned up or too spooked by the previous day's round-up to show themselves. We made it fairly far down into Tom's Cover and even explored a little side channel which took us all the way to the road we had driven on the day before to see the ponies - but still saw no horses. I'm not sure if it was conditions, increasing age, illness (Suzanne had a bad cold) or confused decision-making, but while we muddled around on the water for quite a while we covered only about 8 1/2 miles. On our previous trip we had made it out to the sea buoy and over to the lighthouse for a paddle of 11+ miles. Maybe we're getting lazier, but when we finished up we still felt we had had a nice paddle.

Back at the house we settled into our typical mode of enjoying some drinks, over-eating, and socializing.

Glassy despite the currents

Where the water meets the sky

Lunch break

Stretching/relaxing during lunch

Tom's Cove channel

Sunday brought buckets of rain. Paddling in cold, drenching rain is no fun so instead we hung out, took our time packing up and clearing out the house, and then all went out for breakfast, where we over-ate and socialized. After that some of the group headed to the new Harriett Tubman Underground Railroad Museum. Valerie and I gritted our teeth and dove right into the drive home, which included awful bridge traffic. They've got one lane closed on the bridge which, combined with the fact that everyone on the eastern shore did what we did - packed up and headed home early - made for hours of delay. Yuck. Way to undo the mellowness of the weekend.

But still, well worth it. It did seem that the weekend was over almost as soon as it began - next time, three nights!