Mid-Atlantic Madness
Neither Kim nor I are big Social media users any more though I do watch Instagram to keep up white the next generation and we all tend to use Snapchat for a family chat group and photo vehicle. We call it Marin Madness and its pretty much restricted to the kids, their spouses and us. I’ve gone so far as to steal that sentiment and call my games area on the property Moonstruck Madness in honor of our Snapchat storyline. I’m not sure what my daughter-in-law Valene’s Hathaway family does or my son-in-law John’s Lundholms do, but I do know that the newest official member of Madness is Jenna and her family is perhaps even more clubby that we are and have their Levine 7.5 group all staked out. They are a nuclear family of five with two of those three kids wed, hence seven and one extra 0.5 for the first grandchild (who I doubt has a social media account just yet). I am told they are saving the 8.0 slot for Jenna’s sister’s significant other to be. I’ll have to ask when the 0.5 graduates to full integer value down the road and what happens to grandchild #2…do they get added to the other 0.5 to get topped up to 1.0 and usurp the 8.0 slot? It could get very complicated. I’ve been thinking of going out to secure the URL for Levine Lunacy, just in case the family decides to go our way in this whole extending family social media club naming thing and drops the complicating digits thing.
Tomorrow we fly to the east coast to gather up with the entire Marin Madness crowd for a few days of fun in Virginia Beach. What I know about Virginia Beach I learned by writing my friend Andy’s book, Wardroom Warriors, set in Virginia Beach. The entire Southeastern part of the country has always been a bit of a cipher to me. I unraveled a little bit of that a few months ago with our family trip to Tennessee/Mississippi/Alabama so now I will do likewise with the Mid-Atlantic region between Philadelphia and Norfolk. About all I have seen of that area is what you can see from the Amtrak line from NYC to DC. I kinda like the fact that we are traveling down the Delmarva Peninsula since it seems like an out of the way spot that is like the mid-coastal area of California where the traveling is easier to go inland on the 101. Those east-coasters that want to hightail it to Florida use Rt. 95 and avoid the cove and inlet strewn Chesapeake Bay Area. I see we will be very close to Historic Jamestown and all that American History that surrounds that first stepping off point for our country.
My son Roger has not fallen too far from my planning tendencies, so he has scheduled us for an action-packed four days that has his birthday right in the middle of it. We will drive down from his house in Lewes, Delaware and make our first stop, where we hope to be meeting up with my daughter and her gang who are driving down from Brooklyn, at Chincoteague Island along the Virginia coast. This is where they release some ponies several centuries ago and they now run free along the beach. Should be interesting. From there we go across the Chesapeake to Norfolk/Virginia Beach. Looking at the map and seeing a few emails from my old college gang planning for next year’s 50th reunion reminded me about my old friend Ann Ashbery, who has lived her life in the D.C. area and now lives in retirement in Annapolis, Maryland. When I called her and mentioned that I ws driving down the Delmarva Peninsula tomorrow she got excited because it seems they have vacation property on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, not so very far from where we will be driving. It was a case of so close and yet so far since we will have a schedule to keep and a total of eight of us working our way towards our final destination on Virginia Beach. Maybe next time I’m in the area…if ever, since I’ve never been in the area before.
I had Jamestown on the brain so I asked my son if he thought an hour drive up the river from Norfolk to Jamestown might fit into the action-packed weekend itinerary. He was more accommodating than I thought, but when I asked my other kids about it, everyone seems to remember have gone there at one time or another in their youth when they visited the nearby Williamsburg. Now that I think about it, I remember taking my older kids to Williamsburg, but I don’t remember making the extra effort to go 20 minutes further to see historic Jamestown, the site of the first U.S. colony by Europeans back in 1607. Its interesting to me that something that I cared minimally about 35 years ago should suddenly seem so important to go see. I guess that’s a sign of our aging psyche. History and an appreciation of our heritage seems to grow in us as we get older. It helps me understand my mother’s enthusiasm for the sights we would visit in New England in my youth, sights that I would find hardly any interest in, but which would likely captivate me now.
I am thinking about adding another to-do to an already fun-filled schedule in Virginia Beach and I can feel my own enthusiasm for Jamestown waning. I got lots of accommodation from all my kids and Kim, so it has nothing to do with opposition to the idea, but I am beginning to imagine our days in the heat of a late June beach trip. I am imagining a desire to escape the madness for an hour or two and sit at the pool or on the beach in the shade of an umbrella, sipping a nice cool drink. Then I am thinking about waiting in line with gum on my shoe and shuffling through the natural dirt paths of an historic four hundred year old archeological site that looks very similar to many others I have visited over the years. That’s when I decide that perhaps my forward thinking about this trip is more a liability to my peace and comfort than an opportunity to finally fulfill some long lost dream of finding some heritage roots that my Old Country ancestors actually had nothing to do with (they all came over here in the last 130 years and were nowhere near the Chesapeake Bay. I guess I will change my storyline to be that I must have seen historic Jamestown when my kids were little…and it was great.
What I am glad about is the opportunity to spend time once again with my kids. I must say, now that COVID is well behind us, my theory that we would plan lots of get-togethers even though we were on the west coast has finally played out as expected. Mid-Atlantic Madness here we come.