Seaford, DE to Berlin, MD

49.1 mi / 12.5 mph / 177 ft. climbing
Home: Assateague Island State Park

After four wonderful days with two sets of old friends made new, it was time to return to life “alone”. I pointed RideWithGPS to Assateauge Island, and it made a roughly straight-line path heading southeast from Seaford for 50 miles. By default its routing algorithm favors minor roads, which sometimes makes it add far too many miles, but this time it created an efficient-looking path despite the dozens of turns, so I decided to just trust it.

Delaware (er, I mean, DelaSCARE!) has Halloween creativity too (as usual this is only like 10% of their setup).

After the briefest stretch on busy DE-13, we were on beautiful, nearly-empty farm roads for the next 40 miles. Central New York and southwest Wisconsin share a landscape of open farm fields threaded through with streams of forest. We loved discovering that the same soul-soothing pattern is woven here in Delaware too. The mystery is, why? In New York and Wisconsin, it’s the hills. Where the land is too steep and unfarmable, woods remain. Delaware has a complete absence of hills, so why doesn’t it look more like Illinois, with unbroken expanses of near-the-ground agriculture? Maybe something to do with rivers/wetlands in this low-lying state? Whatever the reason, it made for sublime riding, especially those woods flaring up into the best fall colors we’ve seen this season.

The remains of a watermelon harvest, not something we see every day (or, ever!) There were several watermelon farms, one in the process of harvesting. When we reached the end of this field we were hit with the strong smell of fermentation.

Irrigation in this dry October. Luckily the 41-degree morning had turned to a near-80-degree afternoon, since there was no way to avoid getting sprayed here!

Autumn trees painted in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, and… purple?

Fall colors on Delaware forest roads.

#FindRett curving around a wall of color.

#FindRett again, though I don’t blame you if all you can see is the blaze.

An open field turns into a tunnel through the trees.

Despite the ideal bike-touring conditions, Rett was having a tough go, with her stomach continuing to upset her. We pulled over into an old cemetery for a short break in the shade, which then turned into a longer break as I set up her chair to relax for 15 minutes. The sickly-sweet scent coming off poultry operations wasn’t helping things.

Just after we re-started, we crossed into Maryland, state #22! The Mason-Dixon line technically only covers the north-south line separating Delaware and Maryland, rather than the east-west line we crossed, and Maryland never seceded, but it’s the first state we’ve been in that once had a significant slave population. There is no change in the landscape on the other side of the invisible line though, so in 2024 it’s just as perfect for bike touring as Delaware.

Rett pushed through another few miles, as usual making an impressive effort to enjoy the day’s scenes despite her discomfort. But we reached a point where she simply needed to get something into her stomach in order to carry on. I made the unusual effort to scout ahead for a good shaded spot while she waited in a bad shaded spot, and when we finally got some lunch in her on an abandoned basketball court next to another cemetery, that improved her condition significantly.

We rode through a grass field to leave the basketball court, and we both then had scraping inside our fenders as our wheels went around. They were loaded up with (what we later learned are) sand burrs, super-sharp thorn balls. I didn’t think they had enough strength to get through our tires, but after a couple more miles we made a stop and spent literally ten minutes extracting them from the rubber with tweezers. It’s only relatively-recently that Rett developed the confidence to just take off across grass like she did, so it’s pretty rude to repay her growth with this painful task!

An old Delaware cemetery within view of Maryland.

There were literally no businesses on our route until we reached Berlin, 40 miles into the day. At one point a woman unloading her car in front of her rural house gave a smile and wave as we rolled by, and then called out that we could use her bathroom if we needed to. That’s a form of spontaneous kindness we’ve rarely heard! In Berlin, there are some kind of pedal-powered contraptions that tourists can ride on the railroad tracks, and there were a couple of their guides on foot to flag the crossing. As we were coming to a stop to let them pass, the guides laughed and said, “no, go ahead, you guys definitely don’t have to stop for us!” Just good human spirits all around in addition to the spirit of the land.

The forest-and-farm landscape continued until we were surprisingly-close to the ocean, with the woods opening up less than a mile from Assateague Island. In addition to RideWithGPS, we also have our friends in Georgetown and Seaford to thank for the superlative ride: if they hadn’t drawn us inland, we would have just stayed on a direct coastal route south like I rode in 2010, and while that’s nice too, it would have prevented us from discovering this completely-different aspect that Delaware and Maryland have to offer.

The bridge to Assateauge Island appears in the window at the end of the forest.

But now we were returning to that coast, though Assateauge Island, famous for its feral horses, was too much of a coastal offshoot for us to have the time to explore it in 2010. Before we even entered the state park, we saw our first horse in the marsh grass just on the other side of the bridge, and Mike, the camp host conveniently right across from us in the nearly-empty no-generator C-loop was confident that we would see many more than that before our two night stay was over. We hope so!

The right bridge turned out to be a bicycle/pedestrian-only bridge, yay!

The thin ribbon of Assateague Island, separating Sinepuxent Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.

The day’s biggest downhill after the biggest uphill.

Usually we’re the ones on the Share the Road signs!

Cars heading the other direction on the causeway were slowing down to take photos of this Assateauge horse, hopefully not because it’s the only one they’ve seen!