Chincoteague Days

Sunset over Chesapeake Bay

Exiting the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, Nancy and I encountered one of the natural delights of the Delmarva Peninsula - a Chesapeake Bay sunset. From the narrow peninsula, a clear day means you can watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean and set over Chesapeake Bay.We stopped at the first possible place to listen to the bay waters as the sun crept lower and clouds cast pink streaks across the pale blue sky.

U.S. 13 North in fading summer light

Light pulled away on the rest of our 70-mile drive up the peninsula. The sky's magnificent color  show continued most of the route, finally dying as we turned toward its Atlantic Coast.

Total darkness reigned by the time we crossed the causeway to Chincoteague. The vacation city's main drag hummed. At two of the island’s ice cream parlors, lines stretched out the doors and onto the sidewalk. Cars lined up just to turn into their lots, blocking the street.

Denied local ice cream due to off-season hours on our last visit, we put off any visit until daytime. Instead we went onto the house. We found our friends Chris and Mitzy, Erin and Juergen and their two young children Jack and Mathilda- had long days and planned to retire soon. In the morning we would catch up.


Sunrise arrived early. More than a dozen unfamiliar bird calls, cut with a woodpecker and other tones, carried into our window. The day started Nancy and I joining Jurgen and Jack with a stop at NASA's Wallops Island visitor center. The actual island lies  south of Chincoteague, while the center charts its activities.

Despite being one of the oldest rocket-launching sites  in the world, Wallops Island doesn't have the big rockets of Cape Canaveral. Anyone expecting the building-sized stages of a Saturn V rocket might be disappointed. Instead, the facility usually launches weather balloons and satellites. It's an important mission, but one that flies far under the public's radar. 

Fat man finally gets his soft-serve cone

To truly navigate Chincoteague, we needed bicycles. Hitting up a rental place, we went for pastel beach cruisers common to another era. We rode our temporary bikes around the long, flat streets.

After a short while, Chris and Mitzy rode down to meet us for seafood - what else would we pick for our first Chincoteague meal? Both fish market and restaurant, the interior of Captain Zack's felt like a blast furnace. Ten months earlier, we sat on the balcony at the Chincoteague Motel, watching the island's massive feral cats patrol around a closed Captain Zack's. Nancy had scallops, I had a friend flounder sandwich three times too large for its bun. Flounder are common in the bays around Chincoteague. It might not be a fish I would choose, yet I cannot deny the flat fish on the Eastern Shore.

Vintage bed from the Eastern Shore barrier islands

Full of seafood, we rode again, drifting closer to Main Street. The ice cream palaces emptied out in daylight. All of three people sat on Mr. Whippy's deck. Only a night before the deck seems a threat to collapse from the volume of people. We had chocolate-vanilla twist cones, dropped into Poseidon's Pantry for some snacks and island necessities, then pedaled home. 

Later in the afternoon, we traded pedaling for paddling. We rented a canoe for our stay. The rental house did not sit on the channel running through the neighborhood, but we could walk a boat from the house to the boat ramp in less than a minute.

Barrier island canoes

Nancy and I decided to explore our watery surroundings. The rental house was close to a large bay between Chincoteague and I had not been in a canoe with another person since an ill-fated trip on the Antietam River in 2000, so I was a little nervous. It showed badly.

Nancy put up with my early panic as we paddled into Oyster Bay. Only a few boats and a single jet-ski traveled the bay. The solitude was unmatched as we floated further from waterfront homes. 

At some points, we came close to tidal flats and marshy islands, I could drop the paddle into water and easily touch bottom.  The water depth shifted regularly, so I had to focus hard on maintaining balance.

We came close to an old wooden frame crowded with birds. If it were closer to land it might have been a shattered dock, but this far out, it could have been anything. The bird watched warily. In a flock they vacated the wooden frame as we navigated within 10-15 feet of them.

Reentering the channel posed a mild challenge. We had to cross the bay currents, which attempts to sweep us out of the channel. But once we powered through the current, we coast up the channel and landed our craft.

Tuesday started with a few fierce storm but feeling a little stir-crazy, we ventured out. We headed into the wildlife refuge, eager to explore when rain kept the beach-goers away. Shore birds nested everywhere, constantly moving from the trees, bushes and salt flats.

The ponies clustered a few hundred yards from the road. Further up another traffic jam emerged, this time instigated by an alligator snapping turtle crossing the road to a new marsh. For a turtle, it moved relatively fast, reinforcing why it’s best not to agitate this species. The rainstorm emptied the Chincoteague beach, which often closed due to summer crowds.

Chatham Estates tasting/barrel room

Without anyone in the park, we thought our odds of seeing wildlife on the Woodland Trail would improve. The only wildlife experience in the half-mile of trail we walked was swarms of aggressive mosquitoes. Without our spray, we had no choice but to abandon trail.

Barrier Island Museum of Eastern Virginia, which kept alive the cultures that grew on the now-uninhabited islands off the pensinula’s coast. Communities had thrived until the Great Depression and a series of storms pummeled them in the 1930s.The museum houses artifacts from those islands, including the front desk of a hotel, rowboats and a lighthouse keeper's log loaded with weeks and months of mundane notes, except for the one day when President Grover Cleveland visited.

The museum sat less than two miles from another Eastern Shore landmark we hoped to visit, Chatham Estate Vineyards. Down the dirt road, we came upon a scene more reminiscent of Bordeaux or California wine country - rows of mature grapevines, a stately manor house that dated to the early 19th century and a modern tasting room. In reality, we were just off a creek and several inlets that opened into Chesapeake Bay. Water is never far away on the Delmarva Peninsula.

Chatham estate house with soybeans (foreground) and grapevines (right rear)

The actual tasting area at Chatham was the size of a small bar, since the building also house hundreds of barrels aging their red wines. As an estate winery, they grew everything onsite, including excellent steel-tank Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The wines were not a tourist trap, but made from tasty, complex grapes that showed off the quality of Virginia's wine climate. Nancy and I left with a bottle of each.

From the winery we avoided U. S. 13 as best we could. A set of windy roads ferried us back to the island. The sunny afternoon was just a pause between major storms. Shortly after dinner the lightning and thunder started. The rain put on the best show, saturating the porch screens and cascading down them in wide, slow sheets.  

At mid-week we decided to cut short our Chincoteague stay so we could take a different path home. No matter what roads we took, several long days awaited us. We decided a nothern route through Maryland, Pennsylvania and West Virginia to round out the trip with unexplored terrain.


With Wednesday now our last full day on the island, we set off to make the most of these hours. Nancy and I loaded up our bikes and headed out, originally intenting to meet the others but ending up on a longer path. For me, it would be a day of seafood overload, starting with an omelet at the Chincoteague Diner.

We biked up the path to Chincoteague, which doesn't require admission. We entered the Wildlife Loop, which does is only open to pedestrians and cyclists until 3 p.m.

From the Wildlife Loop we cut over to the Woodland Trail, this time coating ourselves in bug spray to avoid another mosquito bombing. Others weren't as lucky; many times we saw pedestrians furiously swatting and smacking. Needless to say, with so many tourists on the trail, our wildlife experiences of the previous October did not repeal. The sika elk and Delmarva fox squirrels would probably stay deep into the forest until Labor Day. Given the mosquitoes and tourists, we would have too.

Back on the Wildlife Loop, we stumbled onto Assateague Island's greatest hidden gem. A bike trail spur lead to a span of uncrowded beach. Everyone who bike here had 50 square feet to themselves.

Nancy at the bicycle beach

It also explained why we were passed by so many bicycles with kid trailers loaded with beach gear.

To our north we could see the mass of beach tourists who arrived by car. We stood in the surf and watched the brownish waves pound the beach. Tuesday's storms roiled the waters. In every wave, pieces of mollusks and crustacean shells grazed our legs.

Still, this beach was peaceful, a calm oasis adjacent to swath of vacation chaos. For a while we just sat on packed sand above the tide line, content to let the day glide past.

Riding up the beach, the crowds were further down than we expected. It took close to a mile to reach the main beach. Not long after we reached that beach, crowds forced us to walk the bikes up to the road. With a brief stop at the national seashore visitor center, we rode the park road back through the wildlife refuge. 

A new friend at the Tacqueria.

To celebrate a day of bike-riding, Pico Tacqueria, a street taco place with a large yard with cornhole boards and lawn chairs.  We feasted on seafood tacos then contently rode home. Afternoon was mostly relaxing, highlighted by my walk straight into the glass door to the porch. Except for my bruised pride, it didn't leave a mark.

After an aborted attempt to hit the crowded Bill's Seafood, we landed back at the Chincoteague Diner with the same waitress we had 10 hours earlier. With a crab-stuff flounder, I signaled the end to my parade of seafood meals. 

As Erin and Juergen left to put their children to sleep, the rest of us went bar-hopping, or as close as it gets on an island with just a handful of bars. It was not the bar-hopping of old, just drink or two at each stop. We attempted to find old-timers bar built on a barge, but only ran into waterfront chain hotels. The barge bar is gone, replaced by something with tiki torches and a sandy floor that looked suited to a Jimmy Buffett impersonator.

After all, our last night ended with stellar light show. The Perseid meteor shower would peak one night later. By then, we had no guarantee we would be anywhere dark enough to spot meteors. We wandered the streets past the rental house. Close to Oyster Bay, we found a patch of sufficiently dark pavement. I don't know that Chinctoeague would qualify as an official Dark Sky location, but the lack of buildings taller than three stories reduced the light pollution to where we had clear views.

A few minutes away from streetlights gave the dusty disc of our galaxy time to reveal itself. We all laid down below the Milky Way. Soon the meteors began emerging. Most vanished in a blink. A few streaked across the sky. Everyone pointed when the lights came. In a fast hour, we probably saw 30 to 40 meteors of varying size and brightness. In the upper atmosphere, small rocks and space dust go a long way.  On our last night of Chincoteague, they went even further.

The best way to travel on Chincoteague.