Day 11: End of the Road

Editor’s note: Given limited travel opportunities these days, I decided each week to post travel stories I’d written prior to starting this blog. The following is from a cross-country trip I made along the length of US 50 in the spring of 2018. I hope you might vicariously enjoy this trip while we’re all hunkering down at home.

I started out the morning with a very tasty breakfast at the B&B where I was staying near Salisbury, MD. I began explaining my trip to the waitress, when she cut me off and said “so, you really just want to take photos of the two highway 50 signs in Sacramento and Ocean City, right?” Well, not exactly, but I suppose that’s part of it. “I’ve done that,” she said, raising her chin slightly, with the air of someone who’s beat my attempted record. I asked her how long the trip took her. “About 6 hours.” It turns out that she took the photo in Ocean City, then flew to California to visit her grandfather. I told her that, for me, seeing the country and meeting the people was a big part of the trip. She didn’t seem to agree. “Who wants to spend that much time on the road?”

I suppose I have spent a long time on the road during this trip. But the road is one of the few places left where you can be alone with your thoughts, where you aren’t interrupted, and where the stuff you’re watching through the glass screen is real, and you can get out and literally touch it if you so choose. That’s the beauty of (most of) US 50 – scores of times I would simply pull the Yaris over, or even make a quick U-turn, to get out and experience something of interest. You just can’t do that on Interstates. (Some might say you’d be unwise to take a Yaris onto the interstate in the first place…) This trip has given me the opportunity to think about this country and its people, about open spaces and the environment, about time and its scarcity, about patience, about goals, and about serendipity. I don’t typically permit myself long stretches of rumination. A solo cross-country trip gives you that.

So, after breakfast I headed back onto US 50 for the final 30 miles to Ocean City. You can sense the proximity to the Atlantic Ocean. Somehow the air, the atmosphere, the sky just feel different than when you’re approaching the Pacific. Lending to this eastern atmosphere, the sky had clouded over for the first time of my entire trip. The air was damp and cold. I’d been lugging my jacket around for the past two weeks, untouched in the back seat, and finally today it paid off. 

I crossed a drawbridge that is the last bit of US 50, and touched down in Ocean City about 9 am.

Now, I realize that a cold Sunday morning on Mother’s Day is not the ideal time to visit a beach resort, but Ocean City was pretty anticlimactic. The area around this end of US 50 hosts an amusement park that was eerily deserted, and the silence was punctuated only by the crash of waves, an occasional seagull’s cry, and the wind rattling the roll-up door on a concession stand. The overall setting reminded me of the movie “Carnival of Souls.” (See if you can tell which photo is actually from that movie. I’ll convert them all to black and white, so as not to unnecessarily give it away.)

After walking around the abandoned amusement park for a bit, I walked across the beach and dipped my toe in the Atlantic Ocean, just to say I did.

There was only one thing left to do, and that was find the sign marking the beginning of westbound 50, toward Sacramento. After driving around a bit, I located the sign on the drawbridge I had crossed earlier from the opposite direction. I waited until the drawbridge opened and, with the traffic thus stopped, I stood on the middle of the deck and took this picture:

And that was that. My US 50 trip was at an end. Before heading back to Sacramento, I’m heading north to visit my long-lost cousin in Vermont. It’s actually quite a story, that I will try to summarize in less than a paragraph: My grandfather (Henry Boilard) was in the merchant marine, and met my grandmother while docked in Tacoma, Washington. The two got married and my dad was conceived. Then Henry shipped out before Dad was born, and was never heard from again. That’s all I ever knew of my grandfather until a couple of years ago, when I learned that Henry had moved to New York state and started a new family. He had a daughter (Mary), who in turn had a daughter (Bonnie), who is my cousin. Bonnie contacted me out of the blue a couple of years ago, and through her I have learned much about my grandfather, seen photos of him, etc. As I think about this, we should probably do a segment for Story Corps!

So, that’s the end of my US 50 blog. Thank you for your indulgence and your well wishes. I’ve appreciated all the support and friendship. And special thanks to Detlef and Chris for putting me up for a few of my nights on the road!