36.5 mi / 11.6 mph / 220 ft. climbing
Home: Pocomoke River State Park

This morning, we didn’t even need to go see the sunrise to get the Assateague horses to show up; they were there from the moment I crawled out of the tent. Three of them started about 60 feet away, but slowly came closer to our site, heads down obsessively munching grass the whole time while we prepared our own breakfast.

And then, for the first time I’ve seen across three days, they must have had their fill, and they all posed more cooperatively with their heads up. And they must have thought I had a very old camera that requires very long exposure times, because they stood immobile for at least 15 minutes, simply watching us as we ate. It was the first time we’d gotten any indication that these horses even recognize human presence. Eventually one got so bored (comfortable?) with us that he lowered himself to the ground!

And then, with little warning, the spell was broken and one of them said “fuck it, I’m going in”, and headed straight for Rett’s handlebar bag sitting open on the picnic table! I moved in to shoo her off, so she only briefly snuck her nose in the bag, but it was enough to show how much one of these horses could quickly grab and gobble if they wanted to. Mike the camp host, out doing his morning clean-up, heard my “git! Go on now!” and came to our rescue (mostly useful since I wasn’t sure what the “rules” were). It turns out the solution is a water spray bottle; just a couple squirts on her rump got her moving off.

In the end we had a solid hour of intimate “wild” horse interaction, far more than I would have wagered before we arrived. Rett thanks her mom and her dog Pip for sending them to us, and it’s hard to argue with that, since they literally weren’t in anyone else’s campsite but ours. Did they also use yesterday’s briefer visits as a way to become comfortable with us, just as Doreen’s cat Sheldon stopped shying away from us by our second day in his house?

All the horse-watching meant we were quite slow getting out of camp (also the tent was incredibly-wet with condensation just like yesterday, a change from the nearly-always-dry mornings of the last month). But we didn’t have a giant day, so that was ok.

We had passed through the historic small town of Berlin on the way in, but hadn’t had time to stop. While riding back in that direction, I searched for “bakery”, and about five places popped up on the map, so I didn’t have to twist Rett’s arm to get her to agree to go through again, even if it wasn’t precisely on our minimal-distance route.

Baked Dessert Cafe and Gallery was everything the name suggested, and we loaded up on fall-flavored baked goods, some to eat inside, some to pack for tomorrow (pumpkin pop tarts!), and some to eat while we walked around town a bit to window-shop. Doreen had said it recently made someone’s list of the best small towns in America (she was mad when her beloved Skaneateles, NY made the same list). Both are clearly deserving, and remarkably similar (a core of cute downtown shops, surrounded by a town well-kept houses, quickly giving way to fields and forests), though somehow Berlin manages to support two or three times as many shops in a similar footprint.

So within a couple minutes of leaving the center of Berlin, we were back on the perfect empty backroads of the Delmarva peninsula. Rett said it felt like a real “bike touring” day, and for me, it was that mix of a seashore morning with horses, a fancy town visit, and ideal rural riding that combined to make it something you would read as a travel itinerary in one of those magazines that published the “Best small towns…” lists.

The only grocery store on our route was near the end of our day. The Snow Hill Foodrite was known as Goff’s Great Valu in 2010, and it didn’t have the gas pumps outside. But it was still easy to find the spot on the concrete where Dennis and I had sat 14 years ago to call in to an important teleconference where we would learn the plans Synopsys had for us when they completed the acquisition of the company we both worked for. We were shocked to learn that their plans didn’t involve us at all. Our entire group was no longer employed.

Ok, it wasn’t a complete shock; before we had left for our three-week vacation, we joked with our colleagues to let us know if we all got fired while we were gone, because then we would just keep on riding! The proof that we had been joking is that we didn’t hold up our end of the deal even though Synopsys did their part; we returned home as planned to deal with the uncertainty and do what we felt was necessary to get our lives back on track as soon as possible.

I could say that’s a decision we still regret, but really Synopsys should regret their decision even more. Because the metaphysical switch sitting here at Goff’s Great Valu redirected our lives onto tracks that arguably took us to an even better destination than where we had been headed. Dennis holds a highly valued (and valuable) position that our previous tracks probably wouldn’t have allowed him to rise to, and I’ve been comfortably retired for three-and-a-half years already! For something that at the time felt like a life-shattering moment, really the only bad thing to come out of it is that Dennis and I stopped seeing each other at work every day.

The store wasn’t our only repeat from 14 years ago; we had also camped at Pocomoke River State Park. Perhaps not surprisingly, I didn’t remember a single thing along the route between the two (despite Snow Hill having some exceptional houses and a gorgeous park), since my mind was surely a million miles from this place. So I was glad to have the opportunity to be more present this time, and the campground was just what I’d hoped it would be: a repeat of one of the breathtaking colored forests we had been riding through, except we could sleep in this one! Huge sites, completely invisible from each other, dry soft ground that tent stakes slide into like butter, and more very nice Maryland State Park bathrooms (with a dishwashing sink again! Though I did the dishes this time since I knew Rett would not enjoy the wall above the sink absolutely covered in daddy-long-legs).