Not missin' it

The weather that is. To get up to speed I have to jump over a wide hurdle of time that elapsed since that last post. After crashing in the 'Dena for the spring and summer we had plans to head up north. As far north in Maine as we could get to be more precise. Well that plan crumbled to dust and blew away as early fall settled in and before we could begin to plan our Halloween costumes we found ourselves whisked away to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Salisbury.

This wasn't really what we had in mind when we decided to start traveling again after selling our house last April, but we made the best of DelMarValous. We made it out to Ocean City and the Delaware beaches as often as we could before the love of the sun crept too far toward the Tropic of Capricorn.

When we weren't being hypnotized by the elegant pull of ocean surf we spent most of our other weekends back in Baltimore. Although toward the end of Leslie's assignment we began attending trivia nights at the Green Turtle in Salisbury. This bar uses a company called "Let's Do Trivia" but there are several other equally reputable companies organizing trivia nights out there. This quickly became a moderate obsession and we have since (SPOILER ALERT!) found another company in Tampa, "Team Trivia", that operates out of a pizza joint called the Mellow Mushroom. It's a great way to flex your gray matter and find out at least a ball park figure for how much useless information you have up in the old noodle.

At any rate, we did happen to check out a few street festivals that occur during the fall and early winter in Ocean City. In September we had the displeasure of getting sucked into the annual Sun Fest which, unless you're in the market for living room decor gift ideas for your grandparents, isn't much more than an over-crowded and over-hyped excuse to buy turkey legs and snow cones.

Then, just before we left in December we experienced what some five year olds probably consider to be a blast when we witnessed the lack-luster Winterfest. The amount of marketing put out ahead of this event was enough to get our attention, particularly their claim that AOL listed Winterfest in the top ten for Christmas light displays in the country. This provokes me question either the validity of their claim or the reputation of AOL as a judge on fun and entertaining things to do. In short Winterfest is a ten minute ride in one of the famous (infamous) train vehicles that troll unabated up and down the boardwalk every summer. The train takes you around a small park that has animatronic displays of Christmas lights scattered throughout. Granted, some of the displays were creative but you could easily have the same experience for free driving around to any number of neighborhoods in your area to similar effect.

As the mercury continued to dive, we began the all too familiar process of packing up our essentials to prepare for a two day jaunt down to Tampa, FL. More on that to come...