42.4 mi / 12.3 mph / 212 ft. climbing
Home: First Landing State Park

Today we would cross the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay (via the Bridge-Tunnel), which yesterday’s tailwind-fueled longer-than-expected ride allowed us reach a day earlier than planned. The bargain we had struck with our bodies was that today could then be a shorter ~35 mile ride. But then Rett lost her shorts, I realized that Virginia Beach was big enough to have an REI, and that the next REI on our route wouldn’t appear until Florida. But the shopping trip would cost an extra 9 miles, which we wouldn’t be able to do until after our 1pm Bridge-Tunnel “appointment”, and that’s what added a lot of stressful decision-making to our plates last night.

First we had 27 miles left to ride on the underhyped Delmarva peninsula, again mostly on the empty back roads. In a had-to-be-staged “introduction to The South”, we soon passed a field of dark plants dotted with pure-white puff-balls. Cotton?! I’ve both done this ride through the coastal South before, and been more-inland through Georgia and Alabama, and I’ve literally never seen a cotton crop before. Or, maybe I had, but didn’t notice because it was the wrong time of year and the snowballs weren’t bursting forth?

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel is a 17-mile-long piece of highway infrastructure on which bicycles are prohibited. In other places, the only option might be to try our luck flagging down a pickup truck and begging them to take us across, but here the CBBT formalizes that idea by arranging for one of their service trucks to do the hauling. I’d called ahead yesterday (as their website requests) and nice woman I talked to penciled us in for a roughly-1pm shuttle. It sounded like the system was run exactly as it was when Dennis and I took advantage of it 14 years ago, which meant that there would be some dependence on where their maintenance workers happened to be when we turned up. With the REI excursion now added to our schedule, we turned up early, but I prepared Rett for the possibility that it could take until 2pm to get us across.

Instead, we had barely parked the bikes at the toll booth administrative building when a pickup truck pulled up and told us that he was our ride. Perfect! Dennis had written how completely unhelpful our driver had been in 2010 (which, hey, it’s not really his job), so it was nice that this guy was happy to jump up into the bed of his pickup and help haul up our only-half-unloaded bikes and find space for them amid all the rest of his equipment (we kept the panniers attached on one side of each of our bikes to lean them against the outside of the truck bed).

Then we packed in to the single row in the cab, paid the $16 toll (our only cost for this service), and began the drive across. The bridge portion actually has good shoulders the whole way, so biking wouldn’t be too bad there, but it’s the two mile-long underwater tunnels that would be the challenge (though even those would theoretically be passable on a narrow walkway). Still, the ride is far-preferable! Our driver said we’re only the 2nd cyclists this year that he has taken across, and while surely there are also other workers who share the load, the heat map data confirms that surprisingly few cyclists take advantage of this service.

The length of the crossing made it feel like we should be in a different state, but no, this is still Virginia. Honestly Virginia should just cede its “Eastern Shore” triangle on the Delmarva peninsula to Maryland, to make the political boundary match the physical boundary. The 11-mile crow-flies distance between these two sections of Virginia is comparable to the ferry-crossed distances between New Jersey and Delaware, and New York and New Jersey, and outside of Hawaii, Alaska, and Michigan, I think it’s pretty rare to have such water-disconnected parts of the same state.

It felt like a different world too. The unexpected efficiency of the shuttle meant we were dropped in the Virginia Beach side of the Bridge-Tunnel at 1pm, ahead of when we’d even scheduled our pickup. That meant we’d have plenty of time for the REI run, but it meant we would need to fight through suburban hell-roads completely different from the rural farmscapes of the Eastern Shore. For a couple miles we were able to sneak through some high-end residential neighborhoods, but then we were forced onto 6-lane, no-shoulder Independence Boulevard. Often such wide suburban roads are fine, but here traffic was heavy enough that it wasn’t easy for cars to shift into the left lanes, and many of them squeezed by us far too close.

We took care of business at REI (also replacing Rett’s lost Kula Cloth), and there was no good alternative route back so we ended up actually taking the “advice” of a driver on the way in who had shouted “there’s a sidewalk right there!!!” as he squeezed past us. We rarely take that usually-not-legal, usually-not-actually-safer option, but her it felt like the better choice, and Rett did great navigating all the twists and curbs that sidewalk-riding involves.

First Landing State Park is then a surprising oasis in this populated chaos. Not a quiet oasis, since our campsite was still close to the busy highway, but our large and uniquely-treed site made it feel like we were much further from the bustle than we actually were. On this busy and unknown day, Rett had the good idea of just doing easy-cook, no-dishes backpacker meals for dinner, since we were at REI anyway!