What A Merry Land, Girls! What's In Maryland?

Emma loves being at home.

She has her voluminous art supplies available to attack any picture she might imagine, and loves sharing time with her Mommy and Daddy when they're off work.

With her Nana and Grandpa Wes, she enjoys playing 7-Card No Peekie and Crazy 8's.

All her favorite meals are at her beck and call.

So, with rains forecast to arrive, we postponed our original plan to drive to the Jersey Shore or Chesapeake Bay for a sunny waterside stay until Thursday.

A jovial Enterprise Rental Cars driver picked us up that morning, and upon dropping him back off at his Bryn Mawr storefront, we were off to Maryland on a beautiful sunny day.

As California residents, Julie and I still fully appreciate the beautiful colonial houses interspersed with tracts of forest lands while traveling through the northeast.  Julie set her iPhone map on "skip toll roads" to maximize scenery and minimize potential toll booth aggravation.

The prior day, Emma had told us that McDonald's Chicken Nuggets weren't real chicken, according to the internet, so we weren't sure how she'd react to one of our road trip standard stops for lunch.  We had assured her that no, in fact Chicken McNuggets are made using real chicken, and while they may not be the healthiest thing in the world, they aren't appreciably different than the breaded chicken nuggets or dinosaurs she might have anywhere else.  More importantly, they came with one of her current favorite foods, French fries.

Emma loves French fries so much that she tries to be sure to wear her shirt that says "Bon Appetit" along with a picture of French fries on Fridays (Fry Days).  Another of her favorite t-shirts says "Potatoes Gonna Potate."  Even the harshest critic of McDonald's loves their fries, and apparently Emma even believed us about McNuggets being real chicken (or she re-checked her internet facts during her very limited computer "screen time" she measures with a timer).

The McDonald's Happy Meal has become pretty complicated to order these days, now that the food police seem to have taken control.  It used to be that Happy Meals came with fries and a soft drink, and since Emma wanted a vanilla milk shake, I assumed Julie and I would share that small soda to go along with our McDoubles (2 for $3!).  However, now McDonald's doesn't show the French fries or soda as standard inclusions.  The menu has things like apples, yogurt, orange juice and milk listed, with the modification that some may come at additional charge.  This totally blew my mind, but I soon found out that I could indeed substitute a fountain soda at no additional charge for the drink of unknown additional charge and get a second small container of French fries instead of the "healthier" options (which still come with a teeny container of fries), so we had two little orders of fries that probably added up to about a small order of fries to share.  That worked, and Emma seemed to like her McNuggets as much as her fries.  I ended up drinking the second half of her small milk shake, which was way too big for an 8-year old.

Anyway, after the brief, cheap meal stop, we were on to Chesapeake Bay, where we hiked the Turkey Point Lighthouse Trail.  Along the way Emma stopped several times to do some artwork with a stick in the dirt.  As the afternoon warmed to maybe 75 degrees, seasonal birds soared through the clear blue skies, which we tried to identify based on a posted chart.

Another park sign recapped a few historically significant moments for the Chesapeake Bay, including it being where Francis Scott Key wrote  during the War of 1812 what became our national anthem, a key link of the "Underground Railroad" and the site of the first battle between "ironclad" ships, the Merrimac and the Monitor during our bloody Civil War.

Just before the trip, I had finished another Steve Berry novel, The Lincoln Myth, in which he once again mixed a non-conventional piece of history, in this case from the era beginning with the Constitutional Convention through the Civil War, with a rather conspiratorial spy novel set in the present, mixing in fiction that stretches reality to allow for otherwise totally improbable scenarios.

It included our nation's first capital, Philadelphia, and the first Republican Presidential candidate, John C. Fremont (yes, the same John C. Fremont who is the namesake of Fremont Street in Las Vegas), who in his losing abolitionist campaign in 1856 actually set the stage for President Abraham Lincoln to be credited as the "Great Emancipator."  It also includes some interesting intrigue about the Mormon Church and Utah, which Julie and I drive through a few times each year, so it held my attention.  That's the kind of thing that flashes through my mind as I hike.

Back to Maryland, we took in the views from atop the 100-foot bluff upon which the Lighthouse is perched, but we couldn't actually climb up inside it because the door was locked.  Emma threw some pebbles over the side in the general direction of the calm waters, and then we hiked back.

We drove around by the shore a bit before heading to North East, Maryland, where Julie booked a Comfort Inn for the night.  As expected, it turned out to be a very nice, comfortable hotel.  The free apples wrapped in Saran Wrap and coffee available at check-in were both great.

As mentioned, Emma usually has limited screen time (and she sets a timer herself to be sure she follows the rule).  In what is very non-traditional, there's also not a television in her home, so as I caught up on my work using my computer, Emma was very happy to watch the Cartoon Network.

On the day we'd taken the commuter train to Philadelphia to have lunch with her parents at Drexel, I had mentioned how great it might be if she one day attended Drexel University as a student with her parents still working there, but she said they don't offer classes to become what she wants to be.

Nana said, "Drexel has a wonderful Media Arts program," assuming Emma must be thinking she would want to be an artist, which is her current passion, though I believe her strong math and reading skills will eventually lead her to the sciences like her parents.

"Actually, I want to be a youtube star."

Interestingly, a cartoon we watched in our hotel room turned out to be about a smart little girl who decides to become a youtube star by providing fascinating content.  She becomes frustrated when her brilliant efforts bring a handful of likes but her idiot friends get millions of hits by sharing their screwups.

We soon headed over to Denny's, which was connected by the same parking lot to our hotel.

Emma wanted pancakes, and I know she likes bacon, so I ordered the Meat Lovers Grand Slam for us to split. Julie was rather dubious about Denny's cuisine, which I had assured her would be very good, but when I pointed out that we could order the chicken tenders off the kids menu with a side of apples and dipping sauce for her to also split with Emma, she was sold.

Emma wanted pancakes, and I know she likes bacon, so I ordered the Meat Lovers Grand Slam for us to split.  Julie was rather dubious about Denny's cuisine, which I had assured her would be very good, but when I pointed out that we could order the chicken tenders off the kids menu with a side of apples and dipping sauce for her to also split with Emma, she was sold.

The girls reported that the chicken tenders were great, and the dipping sauce turned out to be caramel sundae topping, so Emma basically was eating a caramel apple along with her huge pancake.

I actually gave Emma half of two stacked pancakes, half of the scrambled eggs and two pieces of bacon, leaving me with the same amount of pancakes and eggs plus three sausages and one piece of bacon, because Emma doesn't like sausages.  After Emma ran out of apples, she poured the remaining caramel on her pancakes, which already had sugar-free maple syrup on them.  After eating some chicken tenders as well, she couldn't finish all of her pancakes, and I have to say they were darn good with caramel on them.

We were all stuffed from a meal that turned out to cost a little more than expected due to the waitress charging the 99 cent add-on chicken tenders incorrectly as a separate a la carte order for Julie rather than an addition to the kids meal --- and in all fairness, it was Julie who was eating them --- but it was still a delicious, filling meal at a reasonable price.  Families can still eat well in America for very reasonable pricing, and as long as you aren't each ordering huge meals that you power down alone, it doesn't seem unhealthy to me.

We settled in for a good night's sleep, appreciating a little more TV after a week without it.  "My name is Wes, and I'm a TV-aholic."

All was well until about 10:30 PM, when the inconsiderate person next door who had smuggled a little dog into her room went out bar hopping or something.  The little dog started yipping, and it barked until I finally fell asleep.

I had gone to the front desk after about a half hour, when it became apparent that our neighbor had not simply gone to grab a fast food bite.

The front desk clerk said this shouldn't have happened, because anyone with a pet is put in a special part of the hotel down the hall.  After all, some people have pet allergies and of course sometimes dogs bark.  As I said, I fell asleep eventually, and Emma wasn't aware of it at all, but it did make for an unhappy ending to Julie's day.

The next morning, however, we awoke to a delicious hot breakfast that came free with our room, including make-your-own waffles, which Emma quite enjoyed.

We returned to the room for a little more TV and computer work, and then we were off to answer that age old question, "What did Delaware?"