What it's like here…

This is it!

It's difficult to know where to start with updating you on the events of the past year, but I think starting out by giving you some photos of where we live is a good place to begin.  Although we still live in the Mid-Atlantic and we are only 90 minutes from Washington D.C., the difference couldn't be any more stark from the D.C. and Virginia Beach areas.  

I am absolutely in love with this area!  It has all of the water we enjoyed in Virginia Beach, but none of the development.  You can actually get to the water here, pretty much wherever you want.  We lived close to the oceanfront in Virginia yet couldn't get near it due to development and parking restrictions and crowds.  Here, you can pretty much pull your car over anywhere and launch a kayak or throw a line in and nobody thinks anything of it.

The Navy is the largest employer here due to the test base (all the newest technology is tested here), but historically this area is rural, with most making a living off the water or farming.  This is about ground zero for watermen and their legendary Chesapeake Blue Crab harvesting.  The result of this is that this place is heaven for seafood.  Everyone knows of my love of crab cakes so it's about perfect here.  All of Southern Maryland is a peninsula bordered on 3 sides by the Potomac River, Patuxent River and Chesapeake Bay, which effectively isolates us from the craziness that is the Northern Virginia/D.C. metro area.

This is part of "our backyard" - the pier where we fish on base, I was able to get up early and catch sunrise!  I refer to everything on the base as our backyard since we live right on base!

Another shot of the pier at sunrise.

This is the woods and trail that is behind our house.  

 We finally live among hardwoods and forest!  Our area is usually forested right up to the water line here, unlike the open areas and scrub of Virginia.

Many roads here look like this:

The result are these awesome secluded beaches all over that the trails just end at.

Water EVERYWHERE.

It's actually quite common here to keep kayaks at the ready and we don't look out of place!  In the spring through fall many people that work at the base just keep their kayak on the roof and actually manage to kayak or fish on their lunch hour.  This place is very outdoor oriented.  If you like the city you would probably not like it here!

Lots of fishing and hunting right on base.

This is one of our fishing spots, hubby and the kids always pack trash bags to pick up litter while they are there.

Marley & Sprocket love it here too!  You would never guess Marley is turning 14 years old this summer!

Hopefully you can imagine a little better the area we live in now.  We only have ONE road here that has all the stores, etc on it.  Just one.  It's awesome!

When you envision this area, it really is water and forest everywhere.  We have left the power boats behind in the south and here sailboats and crab fishing boats are king.  If you think of the old Chesapeake Bay photographs you have may have seen in books of watermen and their boats, it's pretty much still that way here. 

Crab pots everywhere here, on docks, boats and stacked behind barns!

For the uninitiated, this is the beautiful Chesapeake Blue Crab, it's Latin name Callinectes sapidus  translates to "Beautiful Swimmer".   Indeed.

It's also a hot bed of Revolutionary War history here, which is way more than I can blog about, but it's cool stuff.

*****

I'm off to the garden plot in 40 mph winds to plant.  It's always 40 mph winds, sigh…..  Challenging, but it should give you something to laugh at when you see me trying to grow things there!  Should have a garden plot update on the next post, it's all been fence building so far this week.