Ocean City, Md., is a great place to spend Labor Day.
Having never been to Ocean City, my daughter Heather and her husband John arranged for a week’s stay there for all of us. The Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland is a unique place in its own right. Agriculture and seafood are big industries with the Maryland blue crabs from the bay.
Ocean City has a wooden boardwalk that is 37 blocks long. That is 3 miles. Travel Channel TV has named it one of the top three boardwalks in the United States. The boardwalk is lined with arcades, restaurants, motels, shops and amusements. The Ocean Galley sells artworks and paintings on the ocean front. The outside of the building is cluttered with “way out” art and signs. Many television shows have featured the building.
During my visit, artists had constructed sandcastles of Bible scenes on the edge of the walk. There is a firefighters memorial on the beach dedicated to the firefighters of the world. The kite shop had dozens of kites flying on the beach in all shapes and colors. I stopped and watched a little girl have great fun chasing 50 seagulls. They would land all around her. She would then run and they would fly, only to settle back down around her again.
About mid-morning every day, the dolphins swim south along the beach. They leap out of the water, causing beachgoers to stop and watch the parade. Some days there are as many as 20 and other days only two or three pairs. Old-timers say there used to be more of the dolphins swimming the coast, but they are big and swift, seeming to ignore the attention that they get.
On one end of the boardwalk at the inlet, the Life-Saving Service Museum is open to history lovers. Not only is the museum a former life saving station, the building houses various collections. Artifacts from the Italian liner Andrea Doria are shown. There’s a collection of souvenirs of Ocean City from the past ó salt and pepper shakers, bowls, statues, signs. Anything that was once sold for beachgoers to purchase and take home is represented. The women’s bathing suit collection is interesting and very conservative by today’s standards. They have a man’s bathing suit on display that was used in the 1920s as a day rental swimsuit. Men could go to the beach bathhouse and rent a swimsuit for the day and then return it when left.
A collection of dozens of cups of sand from around the world caught my attention. All the sand from all the beaches is just a little different in color or texture. The sand from Iwo Jima is coarse and black in color. The Red Sea sand is very rocky. The Moscow River sand is fine and red. The sand from Runaway Bay in Jamaica is cream-colored.
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Read more about the United States Life-Saving Service in next Monday’s LifeStyle.