Day 21: Kent Narrows, MD - Hampton, VA

Oh look!  It is not raining, no, it is nice and sunny and warm!  Zip-a-dee-doo-dah!  Let us break our fast.

The breakfast room is presided over by a whippet-thin lady named Nikki, who never ever stops talking.  She decides I look like Sean Connery.  She needs new glasses, but it does allow me to leave the room with "Sho long, folksh.  The namesh Bond Jamesh Bond" without looking like a complete prat.  Possibly.

Following which I set out into the wastelands of the Delmarva peninsula, which is actually not a wasteland at all, but rather very agricultural in the middle and mostly surrounded by beach resorts on the edges.  It is also as flat as a recently-ironed pancake, to the extent that no cyclist would actually need the ability to change gear.  Talking of gears, Ford have finally answered my plea for manual shifting of the Mustang's auto-box.  Sort of.  The stick now has a position marked "S"; when it's in "S" you can shift using a switch on the side of the shifter knob.  Not as good as flappy paddles.  5/10, must try harder.

The Delmarva peninsula is so named because it consists of bits of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, and it was into Delaware that I went.  Delaware is the home state of the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world, and anyone thinking "But I thought the Stones are British" can go to the top of the class.  And jump off.  I refer, of course to:

George Thorogood and the Destroyers.  This sign is actually in Delaware, but just in case you don't believe me, here's another proof of passage:

And that's the lot!  Yay!

This means that I've now visited all the lower 48 states at least a little bit, and can therefore go to the seaside.  This is what the seaside looks like in this 'hood:

Bethany Beach, DE.  Big Yellow Thing replacing hurricane-removed sand or something.

Driving through the town and its near neighbours makes me doubly certain that I never want to visit the Florida Keys.

On place names: USAnia does go in for some place names that are, to a BRITON, squarely in the Land of Odd.  In the past two days I've seen signs to Greenbackville, Accident, Duck and Onancock.  Fnarr, fnarr.

At the bottom end of the Delmarva peninsula is a piece of Virginia formerly lacking any fixed link with the rest of the state over there (points to the west).  This was corrected in 1964 with the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which is twenty-three miles of engineering Goodness.  Four bridges, a bunch of artificial islands (and one natural one), two tunnels and a million lamp-posts, each equipped with at least one loaded seagull.  Fortunately it hit the windscreen, not me.

A very small fraction of said bridge-tunnel

It's really groovy, although the tunnels confuse Emily no end.  I'm afraid that I cannot help but think of the body of water it traverses as "Cheesypeas Bay".  Damn you, Paul Whitehouse!  Damn you to Hell!

There's another one of these in the vicinity, albeit on a smaller scale.  Actually, there's two, but we won't let the Monitor–Merrimac Memorial Bridge–Tunnel bother us at present.  T'other is the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, which carries I-64 across, er, Hampton Roads where the latter debouches into Cheesypeas Bay.  And it took forever to get onto, due to a three-car shunt at which everyone had to look.  So now I'm in Hampton and, moreover, six floors above the traffic, so it's nice and quiet.  Though it is the South, hence the proliferation of billboards concerning guns (pro) and abortion (anti).

Tomorrow will see me making a leisurely tour to Dulles airport; Bog knows when the Automatic Diary will next be updated as I know not what the state of the wi-fi is at the airport, nor how long this thing will run on its flatteries.  I'll try to fit the District of Columbia on the way; it would be rude not to.  Anyone got anything they'd like me to pass on to that nice President Obambi?