Paying Respect and Catching Crabs

During the planning stages of the trip, I realized that if we were going to be in Washington D.C., we were really close to a cousin of my wife and brother-in-law who lives in southeast Virginia. That cousin in the mother of the girl who committed suicide last year that I blogged about. Because my brother-in-law hadn't seen his cousin since they were children, we thought it would be nice to have a reunion and to pay our respects to her daughter, the very one whom I planted those apple trees in memory of recently. Above is the backyard of that girl's older brother where we spent three nights while he graciously stayed in his old room at his mom's house. The lake in the background is the results from excavations to build a raised entryway to a large bridge nearby. It was a beautiful place to rest and recuperate from many day son the road or in very crowded neighborhoods. 

On one of our days there, we visited the grave of the daughter, buried next to her military father who died way to young of cancer. The rows upon rows of stones of a military cemetery never fail to humble me with all the people who died so I could live with the freedoms I have today. 

We drove to nearby Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on a lark because of it's importance in airplane flight but when we found out the park honoring the Wright brothers was charging $10/person just to enter, we drove to another nearby park that was free, in price and of people, and had a nice picnic lunch. On our way back into SE Virginia, we stopped at a beach to let everyone relax a bit. My wife's cousin and family brought food to us there for a nice supper and then invited us to stay and go crab fishing with them when the sun disappeared. Not knowing what to expect, we accepted the invitation.

I have seen plenty of crab caught on the show Deadliest Catch, but never from a seaside beach. They showed us how to tie a raw chicken leg onto a piece of string and wade out into the water about chest deep and drop the chicken to the ocean floor. When you felt a tug, you pulled up the chicken leg attached to the string with a crab now hanging onto the chicken leg and then deposited the crab into a hand net which we then could safely carry to shore and deposit in a large cooler. Above are the 20 crabs we caught in about 90 minutes time using this method. This was the highlight of the entire trip for me.

The next day, the cousin cooked up a large crab boil with those caught crabs and we ate until our stomachs were tight as a drum.  That evening, we had a loud party with more food and all the first and second cousins enjoying it in the backyard seen at the top of this post. I didn't attend it. I was still full from the crab boil and we were all ready to quit the life on the road we had been living for two weeks and get back home. So with a very early departure planned and me doing all the driving, I went to bed early.

The next morning I got everyone up and into the van and hit the road, not sure how far I could or would make it before calling it a night. Fortunately, everyone was willing to suffer a bit and I got into a groove and some 17 hours later, I pulled the van into my own driveway back in Iowa and after unpacking the essentials, we all went eagerly to bed on stationary objects.