stay-at-home mom

Touring Havre de Grace Boardwalk, Pandemic Style

Havre de Grace is located at the very top of the Chesapeake Bay.

June is always a dizzyingly busy month. We have two family birthdays, Father’s Day, and the end of school. For 2019, 2018, 2016, and 2014, we were also in the middle of a big move. So you can imagine, that the children are all completely bewildered at spending June stuck in our own house. Not just stuck in the house, but in the SAME house as last year! What???

Haaaa! The military life has been quite chaotic for us the past few years. I am so thankful to have a summer off from moving.

what I look like to John David.. every single day…same place….same routines..

But I am about done with hanging out in my kitchen with no end in sight. Watching the boys play video games was only fun for about a week, and I have already finished binge watching all my Netflix shows.

So we have found ourselves in need of ADVENTURES!

Well, I have anyway. Alan must be too because he is the one who booked Ocean City for July 4th!

However, we want to do this responsibly. Catching the rona is not our idea of a good time, and we do respect the pandemic. We have our masks. We wear those indoors, and for the most part, we just stick to the outdoors and keep our distance from others. It’s working so far. Maryland coronavirus numbers are down, and that is a good feeling. We aren’t throwing caution to the wind, though, friends. Don’t worry.

Havre de Grace is located in our side of Maryland, and ever since we moved in, I have heard of the boardwalk there. It turned out to be even more pleasant than I expected. We ate outside at a very casual restaurant called the Promenade Grille. Then we took a nice stroll on the boardwalk, stopping to see the wildlife, read the information signs, and take photos as directed by Mom. This mom likes to take a ton of pictures.

The bay is beautiful and still home to many water birds. We even saw a bald eagle.
Days where we get to all go out adventuring together are truly my favorite.
The War of 1812!!

Daniel was assigned an entire nine week’s worth of reading a history book about our county.

The book is called Sailing Through Time with the Roberts. Most of that history happened to center around Havre de Grace. It was a long book, and it was read during “distance learning,” so I got to read it right along with Daniel. Each week, we would take turns. He would read a page, I would read a page, all the way through the twenty-plus pages of each chapter. It was the longest, most in depth local history book I have ever read. However, the author kept it somewhat interesting, as it was told through the eyes of a time traveling brother and sister. Their time travel instrument was a model skipjack, perfect for the Chesapeake Bay area.

Since Daniel and I read that historical book, our Havre de Grace boardwalk tour made a lot of sense to us. Several times I said, “Look, Daniel! Like in the book!”

“John O’Neil! Like in the book! Remember, he fought the British single-handedly!?

-hehehe- Daniel spent most of the walk saying, “Yeah. Yes, I remember.”

Everyone else in the family was like, “The British attacked Havre de Grace??” It is a small town, not exactly where you would expect a foreign invasion.
The flag you see in the distance is a flag from the 1812 time period.

Have you ever seen a Gold Star Family memorial? I thought this was lovely.

The boys have only left the house to go to a state park and this board walk excursion since March 13th. I have noticed that in the South many sports have started back up, but that isn’t really the case here. We are still almost always at home. They get to see neighbors, and that’s it.

I definitely felt like the youngest fella had completely forgotten how to behave in public. He has always been spirited and uninhibited, but he was a handful at dinner….a loud handful… I think we need to take him out more often to remind him how to behave. We still had fun though.

Young brothers are like wolf cubs really…or wild lion cubs…just wild and silly.
That is a real half-melted old cannon too. You see a lot more of these up here in the Maryland/Virginia/Delaware area than I ever did down south, where I grew up. The colonial history just goes back a little bit further.
I love how free he is to have fun and express himself. Would that we could all be as free as this seven-year-old boy!

So our pandemic-style days out are definitely more solo than usual. Outdoor excursions are my favorite anyway, so this is not a bad deal. However, now that we have begun to get out, we want to do so more and more. Next weekend we are off to Ocean City, but just for one night. I feel like it will be a little harder to keep our distance in a place known for being crowded, and it will be our first hotel stay since the rona. It does make me a touch apprehensive, but we will be careful. I ordered new masks so that we will have enough for this weekend, just in case.

Sad fact: I firmly believe that masks make my eyes look one hundred times more wrinkled.

Here is a link to where I order our masks, from my friend Kristina in Tennessee. She does a wonderful job. She puts a nose grip piece on them that helps with fit.

I looked up coronavirus numbers for Maryland today. We are doing so well here. Alabama has three times the number of cases we do here per day, and Maryland has two million more people than Alabama. Florida, of course, is even worse. That is one reason we are sticking to our plan of waiting until August to visit Alabama and Florida. We long to see our family though. Come August we promise to pile up in the car and come visit!! I am just hoping by then the military will be granting leave so that Alan can come with us. We need numbers to go down for that to happen. Stay safe, friends!!

aprilmomoffour

April is an upbeat, Christian, blog-obsessed, military wife, and home schooling mom of four little boys. She writes about education, travel, and humorous adventures in parenting. Follow along if you’d like a little bit of encouragement and a whole lot of crazy.

View Comments

  • Wow April. I had forgotten how often you have moved. I am glad for you all there was no move this past June. Nice you were able to do some local touring. And even tie it in with some history for Daniel. Hope youare keeping well! :)

    • Me too!! The Lord looked out for us because we were supposed to move this summer, but they pulled us a year early, which took us by surprise. Now I’m so thankful.

  • My sister moved to MD not that long ago to the Bowie area. I don't know how far away Havre de Grace is to that, but I'll have to tell her to go, looks beautiful!

    • Cool! Nowhere in Maryland is more than 4 hours. It's a small state, but it's so funny shaped, thanks to the Chesapeake.

  • I keep track of daily numbers for MA and we're doing well too. So you can visit MA and I can visit MD! Actually, I went to Ocean City, MD as a kid every July and it was magic.

    I respect the rona too! Nose grips are important. I get my kids fun masks and it helps!

  • I want to visit! But then I would have to travel.... and use public bathrooms, and well.... Thanks for sharing your trip. It was like I visited :)

  • That looks like a pretty area and I just LOVE when something ties in so nicely to something we were recently learning about and I can reinforce those lessons with real life things.

    • Yes! I definitely think I was the most excited one...which is kind of normal around here.

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