Just Beachy

Yeah, that's a horrible title but it was the best I could do in a pinch...

A very fine week at Rehoboth, indeed.  Lee's incesssant soaking didn't follow us, and although we arrived with some clouds, five lovely days followed.  Temps held in the low to mid 80s, the water temps were in the +70 range, the waves were perfect.

Rehoboth Beach, DE, is everything that Ocean City, MD, 20 miles to the south is not:  quiet, uncrowded, clean, residential, small.  Excellent restaurants are plentiful - we're most partial to Hobo's and Planet X - and it even has a great microbrewery, Dogfish Head Alehouse.  Plus the requisite number of places to get pizza and ice cream and whatever fried/grilled stuff you could want.

Our place was tiny, but we weren't in it very much.  It did pose the occasional challenge, though. As much as we would have liked to eat out every night, that's expensive and invariably leads to overeating, so we planned a few fresh and easy dinners centered around seafood.  It never occurred to me to take into account the beach nature of the kitchen,. i.e., it probably wouldn't be stocked with anything but basics.  So Thursday evening found me trying to cut up jicama with a cheap little steak knife and grating it for the slaw with a cheese grater.  And the stove was not a standard size - it was very small. There wasn't a baking sheet that was small enough to fit in the oven.  So it's a good thing we were broiling fish, not roasting veggies.  I had to hold the door and periodically rotate the cool end to the back as the fillets cooked.

Long hours of sitting on the beach and reading and reading and reading.  Some "brain candy", but also Claude Rains:  An Actor's Voice, which is excellent.

I've been a Rains fan for a gazillion years, but knew nothing about him except that he came late to the screen and had trained John Gielgud and Charles Laughton.  I found some facinating information:  Rains was a sharpshooter, and so good at it that he considered making a career of the military.  He came out of the trenches of WW I a captain, mostly blind in one eye, and with the roughened voice that became part of his trademark, courtesy of a gas attack.

A cold front moved in Thursday night, smacking Ocean City with a tornado.  Better them than us.  I've sat through a couple of those, once stuck outside, and I would be happy to never experience one again.  But it was a good excuse to go see "The Help".  Loved it, but was horrified - please tell me that there isn't any place where that many air-headed, idiotic women congregate together these days. 

Rehoboth is connected to Cape Henlopen State Park by a nice rail trail, so a couple long morning rides were in order.  During WW II, the area was heavily fortified, and some of the biggest defensive guns and heaviest fortifications we had were at Fort Miles on the Cape.

The observation towers are iconic along the Delaware coast.  I used to think they were built to monitor U-boat activity off the coast, but apparently their purpose was to allow for tracking the trajectory of the long-range shells from the big guns.

My daughter brought her boxer, Rosie.  Turns out Rosie not only loves hiking mountains but loves the beach as well, particularly chasing the little shore birds in the surf.

All too soon it was over - I could have easily done another week.  But at least it was a grey and drippy day when we left - no call of the beach that morning.  We've long preferred going south to Folly Beach in SC, but you lose a whole day traveling on each end.  Rehoboth will do quite nicely from now on, I think.