I left SOB by 4:30 or so, headed right back north. I figured to make the Virginia border between 7 and 8pm and stop for the night around Emporia. As I went back up into North Carolina, the setting sun sometimes made for nice shadows and “golden hour” shots.
I stopped for gas at a Flying J just south of Emporia and then continued into Virginia. I found the Days Inn I was searching for, and managed to pull the truck and trailer into the parking lot without any damage. I parked it, and after checking in and settling a bit, had a spot of dinner from the 5-Guys hamburger joint across the street and then hit the hay. I wanted to get an early start.
The next morning dawned bright and clear. I hitched the wagons and headed north on I-95. The wind had picked up and I could feel the trailer swaying back and forth back there. I’m not an experienced tow’er by any stretch, and kept my speed down to around 55 or 60. I decided that I would hook onto an alternate route when I got up around Richmond, namely US 301, which I could take in a more north-easterly tack, cross the Chesapeake at Annapolis, and then head up the Eastern Shore / Delmarva to Wilmington DE and then home. It was a slightly more scenic and less stressful run, especially considering the heavy traffic that I’d seen going northbound into DC and Baltimore yesterday. I didn’t want to spend the whole day in 5 mph traffic.
I took the I-295 bypass around Richmond, just for the hell of it. Traffic crosses over the James River twice on the outer loop there.
A little bit north of Richmond, just follow the signs for Fort A. P. Hill, and take US 301 North at Ruther Glen. US Route 301 is a tree-lined, mostly four-lane road that runs through the big Army base up there. It’s an easy, scenic drive, and at this time on a Sunday morning, there was very little traffic. It used to be one of the main North-South routes before Interstate 95 went in. It was a nice alternative to US Route 1. I like driving it.
After the Fort and the little burg of Port Royal, you get a nice bridge over the Rappahannock River, and after a bit of a roller coaster ride up and down, you come to the US Naval Surface Warfare R&D center at Dahlgren, where they develop, design and fire off all the new guns and missiles for the Navy. They’ve had some pretty distinguished scientists work here over the years, including Einstein, Edward Teller, Grace Hopper, and many others. They developed the Norden bomb sight here, which of course was used all over World War II to help the B-17s and B-29s drop bombs right down Hitler’s ass-crack. They also did the Tomahawk guided missile. Now they do all sorts of fancy stuff with lasers and “directed-energy” weapons, as the Navy calls Death Rays.
We made it past Dahlgren miles of chain-link razor fence without getting vaporized, and took another bridge over the Potomac River. When you come down on the other side, off the narrow little bridge, you’re in Newburg, Maryland, which according to Wikipedia, has two stores and a lodge hall.
The next chunk of roadway is a little different from back in Virginia – this is a stretch of 301 with a lot of development, on both sides of the road, and quite a bit of stop-and-go traffic at times. You pass through Bel Alton, La Plata, Waldorf, and the Upper Marlboro area, before finally hooking up with US highway 50 connecting Baltimore and Annapolis. That eight-lane stretch quickly gets you to the Severn River past the Naval Academy.
The Bridge over the Chesapeake Bay here is a dual span job that takes you up and about 200 feet above the water, and can be a lot of fun in blowing snow, ice and generally crappy weather, which I’ve done a couple of times. Luckily, today was sunny, bright, and clear, with only a 40 mph wind blowing left to right and threatening to toss us all into the drink. But we crab-walked over at a brisk 50, and came back to land in Queenstown and the eastern shore area of Maryland.
After a few miles of fast food shops, car repair places, and oddly congested area full of old crabbers, US 301 and US 50 split up. 50 heads east to Ocean City, Maryland after its cross-country journey, and 301 heads North-North-east up towards Wilmington. I have an odd fascination with this stretch of road, it’s pretty much flat as a board, straight, and completely uneventful. A very odd hunk of highway, given that it’s pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the teeming Megalopolis of NYC-PHILA-BALTO-WASHDC. There is a really nice Welcome center about forty miles up the road, oddly about halfway between Virginia, Maryland and Delaware.
301 continues up towards civilization, crossing over into Delaware near Middletown, full of orange barrels and construction. There’s a big Amazon warehouse down here amongst the chickens and alfalfa.
A little farther north, the pike crosses over the C&D Canal, and then good ol’ USA Route 301, all the way up from Tampa/St Pete in Florida, ends rather ingloriously by merging into Route 40 in Glasgow, Delaware.
I got home with the cargo intact around 4:30 or 5 pm, and we spent the next two hours unloading.