When the lilies bloomed, it was time. It was time to pack up all our stuff and go camping – at least that’s how it once was. The kids typically got out of school the second week in June – when our backyard lilies were in full bloom. The last day when the kids came home, it was off to an enchanted place called Cherrystone Campground on the Eastern Shore, the Land of Pleasant Living. And pleasant it was.
We began camping at Cherrystone in 1975 in a small pop-up camper, which we could pull by hand to the top of a dune at the edge of the bay. We later traded up to a bigger pop-up, bought a small camping trailer and when our third child, Laura, was due, we bought a 25 foot Coachman Camper that would sleep 9 if it absolutely had to. I think 6 was our record, but the memories of the sheer amount of fun we had on those family endeavors can never be erased.
Cherrystone was a wonderful campground because it had something for everyone. We fished and wielded crab lines and waded in the shallows for softshell crabs. We caught minnows in our traps as flounder bait and we ate flounder most every night – each one caught fresh that very day. There was a skating rink and a tennis court and a putt-putt golf course. The Rec Hall showcased pin ball and Pac Man machines and a pool table. The kids ate hand dipped ice cream and banana splits at the camp restaurant and an occasional pizza when they tired of fish and crabs. There was a small, sandy beach where the ladies basked in the sun and three swimming pools in which to take a dip.
I often brought a boat and we motored out to the mouth of Cape Charles and caught trout, flounder, whiting, spot and croakers to our heart’s content. In the early years, big bluefish made regular blitzes along the shoreline and we caught them to 10 pounds and more.
A near-daily ritual was picking hard crabs on a picnic table covered with that morning’s newspapers. Sometimes we ate the crabs for dinner as we were picking and sometimes we just picked a quart of so of crab meat for crab cakes later than night. We sat by the fire each evening, sang and played the guitar. Sometimes the kids would hike up to the shelter and play an evening game of Bingo. They met lots of friends and rode their bikes everywhere.
We did this for about 30 years, until the old camper could no longer be patched together with duct tape. We still go back to Cherrystone, or we try to each summer, but we now stay in one of their campers or trailers. It’s still fun, but never like it was when the lilies bloomed.