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Assateague Island Maryland 2009Monday, October 12. 2009
This was a 3-day weekend trip, Saturday through Monday, and our destination is close enough (200 miles or 3.5 hours non-stop) to do this with ease. Assateague Island is a barrier strip with half in Maryland and half in Virginia, and it being an island on the East Coast it has the Atlantic ocean on the East and the bay on the West side. Both have their beauty, though the bay is naturally more buggy
 . In mid October the insects are pretty much gone (except flies), especially on the ocean side, making it a great time to go there. The island is well known for its wild/feral small horses that roam freely and steal your food. D15 = Good! There are alternatives to getting paved spots in the parks - backcountry camping (read: hike 2.5-15 miles carrying all your fresh water) is permitted but not reservable. I have friends who have done this, and this is probably not a beginner backpacking adventure unless you're in great shape - walking on the sand with 50lbs on your back can be a challenge. Alternatively, the park offers OSV (Over Sand Vehicle) permits, though I couldn't quite figure out if you can overnight (seemed like a "NO" unless you are actively fishing. What does "actively fishing" mean, exactly?) or if you can bring a trailer onto the sand (seemed like a pretty strong "NO"). I am pretty sure my truck could do it, though I'd probably not let someone like me onto the beach Getting there was uneventful, my old Garmin C330 had no trouble bringing me directly to the park entrance (Assateauge is in its database), and the people are quite nice. Their access control system boils down to an automatic gate with a 3 digit code, which they give you with your parking hang-tag. We traveled with our fresh tank empty since there is a dump station and faucet available in the campground. Note that there are no camping spots with full hookups, meaning that as you get close to the 11AM checkout time, a pretty sizeable line of RV's forms at the dump station, which handles just one vehicle at a time. We were leaving on a Monday, but the line was still at least 15 RV's long, so we found a free dump site along our way home (Dover Slots) on sanidumps.com and that had no wait. Now about the park: Staying in the park itself certainly has its rewards. We are 30 seconds from the beach (that's us on the right and the ocean on the left):
 Ocean and us You hear the ocean (and the wind, which can get quite strong - too strong for awnings, but good for wind turbines if you have one) all the time, you have no shade (good for my solar panels), there is pleasant sand to walk on (you can walk barefoot to the beach), and it's quiet at night. At least it was for us, in part because we were in "Loop D", which seems to have short sites (about 25' long), and we were the only RV on the loop, surrounded by haphazard rows of tents (I'm not counting one Westy as an RV). All these less-equipped campers have nothing to do once it gets dark and cold, and the campground gets pretty quiet pretty quickly. In fact I took care to minimize light pollution from our trailer to avoid keeping the others awake. Here is what our parking situation looks like on Loop D:  Parking Situation Note the path over the dunes in the left part of the photo above - that's all we have to walk to get to the ocean! The sky is relatively bright here, disregarding the obnoxiously bright lights coming from Ocean City (I think?) about 8 miles North. I had the wonderful experience of walking out onto the beach after sundown, I was alone for miles (at least I think I was), and it wasn't too cold or too windy to just stand there for a while and take in the environment. To us metro-area dwellers this is always a shocking experience - looking up and seeing a bright starry sky, it makes me want to say something like: "Wow, it's like the real thing!" Our battery (my junkyard reconditioned and desulphated 100aH deep cycle 12V group 27) held up admirably, we used at least 20A the first day and it only went down to about 60% (12.2V) by morning, suggesting that it has at least a usable capacity of 60Ah. Pretty good for a free battery. The next day we were rewarded with nearly continuous full sun, which in October grants me a peak charge rate of about 3.8A, so we probably would have put most of it back if it weren't for my wife's 5+ hours on the laptop, followed by watching a movie ("Watchmen" turned out to be 2.5 hours long!) on the laptop, using the trailer's stereo for the sound. (With a Dell Latitude D610 and the 75W mini inverter it pulls about 3-4A). In bright sun we were putting more in than we were taking out, so by the next morning it was still at 60%. I figured that keeping the battery above 50% is fine, plus I don't expect to baby the battery enough to be able to bequeath it to my grandchildren (nor do I plan to have those either, come to think of it). By Sunday afternoon all the weekenders cleared out and the place looked pretty deserted. Since there are some knolls, dunes and bushes here and there, you do get some privacy, and you can't really see all the loops from our site, so the place probably didn't look as deserted as it could have. This is the general appearance by Monday:  We are camping alone This is what the ocean looks like from the same area I took the previous photo from:  The Ocean and beach Trackbacks
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