East Coast, West Coast, Best Coast

The spreading gold fields of Delaware

Destination Unknown

This trip has taught me to love many places and things that I didn’t know I loved before.

The California desert, with its scorched mystery and deep starry skies and rivers of Painted Lady butterflies. During wildflower season – which lasts about 3 weeks – the air at sunset smells like a perfume made of purple, tangerine and yellow.

The deep green forests of Louisiana, so tangled that they seem to suck you in like a dizzying whirlpool of verdure, steamy and alive.

The rustling cornfields of the midwest and east, always hinting at something alive and peeping out just beyond those first rows by the road.

The wind-swept rocky canyons and mesas of New Mexico with ever-changing bands of light made by clouds spilling over the red rocks.

Wells, Maine gave me some spectacular sunsets.

Take Me Down to the Sea

It is a grand and beautiful country, but my people, there is no place for me like a coast. When I saw Cape Cod, I burst into tears and then felt a weight lifting off of me, but I wasn’t home. It wasn’t until I walked on the beach at Wells, Maine, that a ribbon unfurled in my heart, tied all the way back to the mouth of Ventura Harbor, 3112 miles away.

The horseshoe crabs at Bethany Beach, Delaware were spectacular and a little frightening.

After that, I wanted to cling to the coast. I took the inconvenient path south through Delaware and Maryland, both of which I fell in love with.

I took a lovely hike out to this estuary in Delaware.

With the Ponies

I spent a week on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, re-reading the horse story of Misty of Chincoteague from my childhood. (Synposis: every year, wild ponies from Assateague Island are swum across a narrow channel to be auctioned on Chincoteague so their numbers don’t grow too big. A boy and girl living on a farm with their grandparents save money to buy a pony and her foal. They train the horses, race the mother and eventually return her to the wild, keeping the foal).

Heading south, I gloried in the sunrise over Chesapeake Bay on the Chesapeake Bay Bridges and survived the interspersed tunnels (barely – two narrow lanes facing one another, speed limit 55 mph, giant trucks coming straight at you and appearing to scrape the roof of the tunnel as they fly).

Virginia Beach was tougher because they certainly know how to keep the beach from people driving an RV (day-use parking was $15 in the sole lot that could accommodate RVs).

Roanoke Island VA, home of the lost colony, retains a certain mystery.

The Wright Brothers National Memorial, Kitty Hawk, NC

Take to the Air

But the Outer Banks of North Carolina – now there’s a place I could live. So homey, like a really flat Malibu. I stopped at Kitty Hawk and learned all about the Wright Brothers and thought about how far aviation has come, just having spent a week under the flight path of F-18s from Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach having my windows rattled every few minutes.

And now, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There are skyscrapers along the beach, which is flat and white and beautiful and seems to stretch on forever. There is a state beach park where the trees arch over the roads, dripping Spanish moss. It is warm and steamy and largely deserted for winter. I’m thinking about staying a while.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Myrtle Beach State Beach Park