The most almighty heatwave descended on DC this weekend, so we were very pleased to skip town and head to Chesapeake Bay, to celebrate our second wedding anniversary yesterday.
We hired a car and headed out of town along the roads we last drove along on that fateful Saturday after our party, when I had to return Alison's car to her. Hdddrrdrddrr. Our soundtrack for the sunny, air conditioned ride was our new acquisitions of 'Soviet Kitsch' (which I didn't like very much) and the DeVotchKa album, which I looooved.
Tilghman Island is a couple of hours from DC, right at the tip of Chesapeake Bay. Much like Montauk, you have to drive through a fancy place (St Michaels, in this case - the Hamptons in Montauk's) to get there, but unfortunately there wasn't much of a view for us to see, as the whole place was shrouded in a thick white fog. We went over an incredibly long bridge which must have beautiful views across the bay either side, but could barely see the car in front of us, let alone the edge of the bridge.
Unfortunately the fog hadn't lifted by the time we got to Black Walnut Point Inn - our B&B. Again, it must have lovely views across the bay, but all that lay beyond the trees and lawn was a thick wall of white.
Tom - the owner of the B&B was very welcoming and spoke with a thick southern drawl, rather than the cockney that Hugh had promised us. When we asked him whether he'd recommend the Tilghman Inn for a special dinner, he strongly warned us off it, explaining that, 'it's run by a couple of gays. Not that that matters. Erm, and the portions are really small'.
His recommendation was for Harrisons, a good, family establishment with big portions and great coleslaw. So we headed there for lunch, saving our Tilghman Inn plans for supper. Just as we walked into Harrisons, Hillary Clinton's concession speech was starting on CNN, showing in the bar. It was really interesting to see the contrast between her speaking yesterday and on Tuesday. On Tuesday, she was full of conviction and energy, but yesterday she was just reading off a pad and I didn't believe what she was saying. No huge surprise, I guess.
Harrisons was horrible. The waitress looked annoyed that we doubled the number of tables she had to look after and we attracted many glances of rank suspicion from the many very local people at the bar who obviously rarely see strangers. The food was awful, too - we both had breaded things and my prawns and Max's chicken were really dry and gross. But the 'slaw was indeed pretty good.
It had been unbearably muggy when we left DC and, although it was still incredibly hot in on 
Chesapeake Bay, it was a clear heat with a nice breeze. So we were glad to spend the afternoon by the pool, relaxing in the sunshine with no-one else around, reading magazines and dipping in the pool when we got too hot, as if on holiday. There was a massive cross at the end of the garden, which I guess was to warn fishermen or something, but which cast quite an eery feeling over the fog-engulfed water and empty grounds of the B&B, run by a scary-but-welcoming southern homophobe.
We had to share the pool with an automatic hoover thing that kept following us around and in fact heard Tom's wife tell another set of visitors that the pool's not open at the moment, but chose to ignore that as we hadn't been told directly and it was simply too boiling hot not to spend most of the afternoon submerged. I had a lovely snooze after my swim, enjoying the sensation of the warm/boiling hot sun on my back.
When I woke up, the fog had cleared a little bit and we could see a bit of the water of the bay, but not much. I had also picked up a handful of ginormous mosquito bites.
In the hope of celebrating our anniversary in style and exorcising the bad memories of lunch, we got changed into our finery and headed to Tilghman Inn for dinner. The reception there was about as warm as it had been at Harrisons and we had to wait until a table became free. We did so at the bar, where we watched a hilarious harassed barmaid enjoy getting herself really worked up about the tiniest tiniest of requests at her almost deserted bar. She was a middle-aged lady from Connecticut who's an events florist by trade (she's 'done' the White House, don't you know), but came here because she visited a while ago and 'liked the energy'. I can assure you she doesn't like it now. She's on minimum wage and it's all really expensive on Tilghman Island, because people mainly just retire there.
We made the mistake of engaging her on the election and learned that she's an aging hippy who's cross with everyone involved in the election and sees no-one representing her needs. Obama's useless, apparently.
We were quite relieved when our table became free, though not so much when the food proved to be gross again. We'll just have to save the proper celebrations for our actual anniversary on Tuesday.
Halfway through supper, I became aware of a light lighting up the whole sky and assumed it must be a lighthouse, as there was no rain or thunder and the light was really regular. It was still going as we drove back to the B&B, but we suddenly realised that it was lightning! No rain, no thunder, but the most amazing lightning I've ever seen. When we got to the B&B the fog had completely cleared and we could watch this incredible light show take place on the other side of the bay. Sometimes massive sheet lightning would light up the sky to reveal clouds that didn't seem to be there when it was dark, and other times there'd be this really vicious, angry red fork lightning pummeling the other side of the bay - DC and Baltimore, I guess. It was amazing and just went on and on and on, like the people in those towns had angered some primordial god.
I realised I was getting bitten to death, so we headed back inside, leaving the red forks to rain on the poor people. When we got to our room, we discovered that not only had I been bitten more, but my bites from earlier had developed into massive welts! Last year on our anniversary in the New Forest, we'd both got clinically sunburnt and couldn't bear to have a sheet on our skin, let alone each other. And this year I was welt woman, unable to stop itching for a moment. And so another romantic anniversary bit the dust!
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