Virginia's Eastern Shore: our first road trip out of quarantine

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The pandemic has caused different kinds of pain for different people. For the very social, the pandemic has meant losing the ability to visit with friends and family in person. For the unemployed, it has meant the loss of income, health insurance, and experience. For those in nursing homes and prisons, it has meant the loss of contact and physical and emotional support. And for people who love to travel, it has meant the shrinking of the world down to a few grocery stores, restaurants, and hardware stores within driving or walking distance.

Over the last 3-4 weeks I’ve seen more and more people I follow in the travel hacking community venturing outside those narrow limits. Usually by car, or by short, non-stop, masked, socially-distanced flight, people are trying to see whether travel can be safe again. After reading and listening to a number of reports, last weekend I put together a short road trip to Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Renting the car

In the past when we needed to rent cars, the most convenient location was a Hertz desk at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue, a short walk away. Whether due to the pandemic, Hertz’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, or both, that location is (at least temporarily) closed, and the best option Autoslash came up with was Hertz’s Union Station location.

I ended up making a week-long reservation from one Wednesday to the next, although we only planned to use the car over the weekend, since it turns out the breakeven point was just around 3-4 days, and we thought the car might be nice to have to run errands on either side of the trip. We did end up using the car to pick up a takeout order on the other side of town on Tuesday, so I think the extra couple bucks turned out to be money well spent.

I hate renting cars, but the experience wasn’t noticeably different from before the pandemic. After going through the tax/gas/insurance rigamarole, the agent told me where the car was parked, and I found it had two “Hertz Gold Standard Clean” stickers “sealing” the front driver and passenger side doors, so to open the door you’d “break” the seal. The car certainly looked clean, but I still couldn’t help but laugh — does that mean they didn’t clean the back seats?

Getting there

I’ll be honest, I grew up in Montana, so the whole “toll road” thing has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Back in Wisconsin we had an “I-Pass” transponder for trips to Illinois, but it disappeared in one of our recent moves, so when Google Maps warned me that our route to Virginia “included toll roads,” I went to the change drawer and put together a formidable stack of quarters, safely stuffing them into the driver side door.

It turns out, the route to Virginia’s Eastern Shore does not include “toll roads.” It includes a single toll bridge, which hilariously only charges for eastbound trips, and not at all hilariously no longer accepts cash. As we neared the bridge and the signs for the toll bridge became more and more frequent, I got more and more anxious. It turns out there’s some way to pay your toll after the fact by mail, and presumably Hertz is going to get a bill sometime in the next year and come after me for it.

My recommendation is just to pick up an E-ZPass transponder. Each state that participates in the E-ZPass system sets its own charges for these things. They’re currently free for Maryland residents and appear to be free in Virginia as well (with a $35 prepaid balance) so if you know anyone you can have one mailed to in those states, that’s probably your best bet. Other state charges are:

Staying there

There are a number of larger tourist towns on the Eastern Shore, including Ocean City in Maryland and Chincoteague in Virginia, but we weren’t comfortable staying there, so we opted for the Hampton Inn & Suites in Exmore, Virginia. At 30,000 Hilton Honors points per night, that ended up being a phenomenal redemption at 0.6 or 0.7 cents per point. Due to a coding error (or one of Hilton’s overlapping promotions) I also got a rack of points back at the end of the stay, which brought the total cost down to just 55,000 points — a great deal.

Just as with the car, the housekeeping staff had placed a tearable sticker on our door before arrival, which one assumes was supposed to indicate that no one had entered the room after it was cleaned. Unfortunately for the pandemic theatrics, the sticker simply fell off, instead of tearing, when I opened the door.

The hotel was by far the place we felt least safe during this trip. Our room was fine, and they proactively asked at check-in whether we wanted to skip housekeeping during our stay, but other than the actual hotel staff themselves (who were great), no one was observing any of the practices we’ve become used to in preventing the spread of the virus. The situation finally reached peak absurdity when I noticed what the unmasked workmen were doing in the lobby on our second day in town: installing the virus prevention signs the hotel had undoubtedly been shipped from Hilton headquarters. Guests were also congregating, eating, and drinking throughout the day in the hotel’s common dining area.

After our first night, we just used the stairs on our end of the building to exit and avoided the lobby area completely.

Eating there

We ordered dinner takeout from two Exmore restaurants, the Exmore Diner and the the Great Machipongo Clam Shack. Both are local institutions that are surely swamped during normal travel seasons. Both are now offering only takeout and drivethrough, and when we called our orders in ahead of time we had a 15-25 minute wait time at each.

Annoyingly, the Exmore Diner has a vast daily specials menu they only post on their Facebook page, so I ordered a serviceable but boring burger instead of the daily steak or pasta dish I would have ordered if the person taking my order had thought to mention it.

The Great Machipongo is one of the weirdest places I’ve ever eaten, which I will illustrate with the following image. This is the “2 Baked Stuffed Clams” listed in the “Sandwiches” portion of their menu:

These are, clearly, two baked stuffed clams. Then they are served, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, on clam shells.

Besides the perfect hush puppies (pictured above), the “She Crab Soup” was a fascinating and delicious twist on clam chowder based on Maryland’s official mollusk (I have no idea if the crab is actually Maryland’s official mollusk, but go with me here).

Chincoteague and Assateague Islands

On Saturday, we drove about an hour north from Exmore to Chincoteague Island and the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. Besides what I would call an “excessive” mosquito population, this part of the trip was great. The Refuge had a $10 per vehicle entrance fee, which gave you access to the entire Virginia side of Assateague island (I’m not sure if the Maryland side is accessible from Chincoteague or whether you have to drive around), including hiking trails, scenic turnoffs (there’s a herd of feral horses managed by the Chincoteague fire department), and Assateague Beach. A number of locations are designated as approved fishing and crabbing spots, for enthusiasts of the region’s famous soft-shell crabs.

We spent an hour or two walking around the beach, and it gave me a chance to reflect on one of the stupid fights people insist on having online about social distancing during the plague. There is a certain faction of online scolds who insist that newspapers showing large groups of people gathering outdoors are misleading people about the relative risks of indoor and outdoor socializing. But that’s not the actual experience anyone has of going to the beach.

On a windy, rainy day, all the groups of people I saw had plenty of space to separate themselves. I can’t imagine any virus transmission happened on Assateague Beach itself. Even the restrooms seemed to have been recently cleaned and were stocked with plenty of hand sanitizer. But the thing beach truthers can’t get their heads around is that “beach” transmission doesn’t happen at the beach. It happens in the car you fill with your friends to drive to the beach.

If we can get groups of people to isolate themselves, we can contain the virus’s spread. If people continue to socialize, they’ll continue to spread the virus. Whether you’re driving to a movie theater, a restaurant, a beach, or a doctor’s appointment doesn’t make the slightest difference to the virus.

Two Chincoteague highlights

After meandering around Assateague Beach, we passed back through Chincoteague proper and got some lunch. Pico Taqueria had awesome vegetarian and fish tacos, and a much better “vibe” than Lily’s Little Mexico, the first place we stopped before being discouraged by the astonishingly slow line and limited menu.

The Black Narrows Brewing Company is also located on Chincoteague, and we enjoyed stopping in for a few sips of beer. They have outdoor seating, where we split a cup of their Weathered Together pale ale, but were not currently selling cans to go due to the now-years-long “aluminum shortage.” The front deck was more crowded than we were comfortable with, but on a rainy afternoon we enjoyed a break on their back lawn, which had some ornamental cover.