My Trip--The Ocean, WW2, Pruney Donuts and Russian Prostitutes Part 2

Here's where we left off last time.....

A beautiful sunrise on Wednesday morning.
Being bored with the cafe in the motel for breakfast(we had used 1 voucher and had 1 left for breakfast to use on Thursday before we left), Hubs ventured out early to forage for morning sustenance while I tried to pry my eyelids open.

I had introduced him to The Fractured Prune last trip.
Seems he was hankering for more 'pruney donuts' this trip.
The FP is a gourmet donut shop that originated in OC.   A few years ago when we had a teacher's strike at the local school and the kids were out of school for 4 weeks at the beginning of that school year, I had taken my boys and one of their friends to Virginia Beach and then, OC and had dragged them to the FP for breakfast one morning.

There were only 2 locations at that time but it seems the FP has caught on and there are scads of outlets down in that area and beyond.  The only problem is they are only open from 7am to noon during the off-season.
They make cake type donuts.....fresh and hot. 
When they pull them from the deep fryer, you tell them what glaze to put on your donut and if you want toppings....like jimmies, chocolate chips, coconut, nuts, marshmallows, etc.
There are 'regular' combinations that are popular that they have on the menu you can get or you can make up your own.
This is something like what Hubs carted back to the room.....still hot.

They may not look like much, but if your computer had Smell-o-vision, you'd be licking your screen.

Seriously, if I lived down there, I'd weigh 600 lbs.....

This was just the incentive Hubs needed to pry my off of the mattress....at least until I ate 3 and then I just wanted to lay back down for 4 hours and sleep the sugar/carb coma off.lol

We did some sightseeing on Wednesday.  Up in Delaware near Bethany Beach they are replacing the little bridge with this monster....

 It's the same type of construction as the bridge on Route 1 that replaced/bybassed the one over Route 13 near St. George DE.   Actually it's called the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Bridge.  It was one of the 1st cable-stayed bridges in the country and the only one in the Delaware Valley.  This one just seems gargantuan for it's purpose.
Gee, did I just talk about another bridge on my Maine trip post?  Maybe I have this latent 'thing' for bridges and engineering, huh? ;-)

When I took the kids during the teacher's strike to OC I noticed these big concrete things along the shoreline as we traveled up the coast from OC to Rehobeth.....

This shot was taken from the car so it only shows the top half.  They are quite tall and obtuse, sticking out from the scenery.
I just discovered that they are fire towers that were built along the coastline in NJ and DE during World War II.  Fire Tower is a misnomer since these were really enemy spotting & artillery aiming towers.  Our military feared/expected a Pearl Harbor type attack on Trenton and the Philly munitions and shipbuilding yards at the head of the Delaware River, so these towers were built along the route to guard against the German battleships they thought were going to sneak up the River......ships that never arrived.  Quite a few have yet to be torn down and there is a group taking on restoring them as they are historically significant.

This shot thrills me yet makes me sad....

The shoreline of Delaware is NOT totally developed and settled yet.  There are towns dotting the shore but there is still open, undeveloped acreage without huge condos or hotels on it.  This is a big contrast to the shoreline once you hit the Maryland line which is wall-to-wall monolithic buildings.  There are some state parks on the beaches in Delaware too so some of the beaches will never be developed.  This was a piece of a state park I saw from the road near where one of the fire towers is located.  It just gave me chills to see a piece of shoreline without a building or a trace of a person having been there.  An unsullied place....well, except for the road.lol

Besides buying groceries again on a vacation....lol....we went to Roses.

When I was growing up, our area was lousy with Roses stores.  It was the Woolworth's of my part of the South.  The Wal-mart of it's day. 
Now it's barely hanging on.  It concentrates on high-end dollar store junk....sort of like a Family Dollar or Dollar General, but the stores are usually bigger.  There are still Roses in VA, DE, MD and NC that I know of.
If we are near a Roses as the holidays approach, we always stop in for this....

I am NOT a fan of fruitcake per se, but.....
Claxton's Fruit Cake is da bomb!  As Alton Brown might say....
Serioulsy.
Good.
Eats.

But being the cheap, miserly, frugal gal I am, I refuse to pay $9 a lb. to buy it locally up north or online.
It was $3.50 a lb. at Roses.  We stocked up......for eating purposes, not gift-giving purposes so if you are on my gift list, don't be a'feared that I'm sending you a fruitcake for Christmas.
You are safe....

After lugging fruitcake bricks to the car it was time for an early dinner so we headed over to West OC to search out a BBQ place we had seen in the phone book.
We found it quickly enough but gee, it was CLOSED like every other restaurant down there in the off-season.
So we drove down the main drag for a bit until I smelled a heavenly porcine aroma and turned me head and saw this....

A kitchy old motel sign, a motel office with a huge B for BUDWEISER Neon sign in the window and an OPEN Flag waving us in from the other side of the office building were a BBQ Joint was perfuming the air with pig from it's on site smoker pitt.

They had me at pig.


We had stumbled upon bbq heaven.
It's name is Rascal's in West Ocean City MD.
If you hanker for smoked/barbecued chicken, brisket or pork, check it out.  Good eats and cheap eats!
We stumbled along to the back entrance of the building into a tiny poolside bar with a few boofs and sat down.

In walked Roscoe Nelson, the owner/manager of the Alamo and Rascal's.
Roscoe turned out to be a pretty colorful character.
He told us all about the history of the Alamo and it's original owner and then about himself.
He knows all the locals in OC and told us to get Denny, the guy who owns the tavern next door to our motel, to tell him the "one armed man" said hi.
Did I mention that Roscoe has one arm?
He lost it when he was 12.
After about a minute and a half of talking to him you forget he's got one arm....that is, until he brings the subject up.

Seems because Roscoe hires pretty foreign women to work his bar and more pretty foreign women live in his motel during the in-season when they work at the hotels in OC, rumors of Prostitution Rings at the Alamo started going around.  And drunk men started showing up in the late evenings/early mornings looking for the whores.....wreaking all kinds of havoc.
Bullet holes in motel windows anyone?

The gal working the bar & tables when we were there was decidely American, not foreign.  Though this rumour started years ago people still turn up at the motel looking for some 'comfort' besides the bbq kind.
Figures I'd end up at an infamous seedy motel owned by a one armed man, with fabled Russian hookers.
Even when I try to be boring, I can't.  I can't make stuff like this up.....lol

Here's a you tube vlog that the DC paper did on the story.....


 I personally liked this article located HERE that the same Washington City Paper outfit also put out.
And before you ask, no, I didn't play horseshoes or "party" with Cory and Roger.  ;-)

The motel is decidedly flea bag-esque but worth the trip for the 'Cue!

After a leisurely breakfast in our motel's cafe Thursday morning-served by Fran who after 2 pots of coffee in her by 8am was chatty as a flock of seagulls fighting over a tourists dropped bag of salted peanuts-we packed it up and headed home.
No lingering since we had to get north of Philly before rush hour started at 3pm.

Here's one more pre-sunrise shot of the Atlantic Ocean.

Funny thing I noticed this trip......usually I can smell the sea air miles before we hit the coast.  This time, not so much.  The beach didn't smell like the beach should.  Hubs even commented on it.  Maybe our noses have shorted out from old age or something....lol

Sluggy

My Trip--The Ocean, WW2, Pruney Donuts and Russian Prostitutes Part 1

Well, I guess that title got your attention enough to look at my post, huh?lol

Let me tell you....thought I run a boring blog and life, it's never a dull moment when I'm around!

Hubs and I took a 3 night get-away to the ocean last week.  That's part of the reason why I wasn't online. ;-)
There is a beachfront motel in Ocean City MD that runs a very nice off-season package including $80 in food vouchers.  And let me tell you, $80 in food vouchers does NOT go very far in the 'OC'...but I digress.

I've been to Ocean City 3 times now in the last few years.  Let me say, I am NOT a big fan of big, built-up beach places....like Ocean City.  The place goes on for miles....over 140 blocks of big ass hotels/motels, junky souvenir shops, pizza joints, restaurants, putt putt golf, ice cream and candy shops and on and on and on.  It's a cacaphony of Visual Clutter in bright colors as far as the seared corneas of your eyes can see.
Not only that but I hear the place swells to a population of over 300,000 in the summer.  I am not a 'wall-to-wall obnoxious, touristy people' type of gal.  Maybe when I was a college student I could handle a beach scene like this....

But now?....not so much.
So we go in the off season when the college crowd and the families with children are back at home and in school. Having grown up in a beach town I relish the beach in the fall and winter when the tourists are scant and the locals rule.  This was more like the scene on the Boardwalk last week in Ocean City, without the snow however...

Relaxing and nothing moving at a frantic pace.  And the $500 a night hotel rooms have dropped to a reasonable price.
Since the tourists are mostly gone until next spring, alot of the businesses are closed up as well at this time of the year so there are no outside pools, no go-karts, no rides, no arcades.  Nothing that would make my head explode.   Just lots of walking along the beach or boardwalk or renting a bike and looking out at the horizon line.

Last trip we did some historical type excursions in the area.  This year, we just sat around and vegetated mostly, contemplating the water and the occasional surfers.

We stopped on the way down in Rehobeth at the Outlet Malls to do some promised clothes shopping for the teens and Hubs picked up some much needed shoes for a deal.  We also did some Christmas shopping as well.....


I did some shelling our 1st morning, as a storm had just passed.  Being among the first on the beach I was able to score this beauty.....

 An intact 8" long Whelk shell.....

These whelk shells, especially of this size, are hard to come by intact off of OC or any mid-Atlantic beach for that matter.   A predatory sea snail, a marine gastropod, use to call this beauty home.  Sort of fitting that the Slugmama, a human gastropod, owns it now....though I don't exactly fit into it.  ;-)
We talked with a local gal on our beach outing, who was oohing and ahhing over my shell.  She had a beautiful Australian Cattle Dog that was an unusual Red Heeler coloring that you don't see much of in the US.  She  had adopted from an Animal Rescue Group.  Real nice dog....and owner.lol

We headed over to West Ocean City later to do some shopping, food shopping.  We picked up a few things to eat during our stay so we didn't have to go out and spend for the high-priced/mediocre quality restaurant offerings or for the ubiquitous fast food.  Those seem to be the only choices in the off-season as alot of food joints are closed up.  We had a choice of Subway, Arby's, Mickey D's type places or some Crab Houses, non-descript local overpriced Restaurants and Pizza Joints or Ruth's Chris Steakhouse where hamburgers start at $30, not including fries.lol

We also hit a Save-Alot grocery store looking for Smithfield Ham for ham biscuits.  This place had it 2 years ago but not now.  We did find the ham at Food Lion and on sale....woohoo!  While at Save-Alot I found a couple of good deals....100% Juice for $.99 and $1.79 and Veg. Oil for $2 for 48 oz. sized bottles.  Daughter has a 'thing' lately for deep fried ravioli and has been going through my oil stockpile, so I loaded up with 4 bottles, since it was almost half the price of what it goes for around here.

We also hit the Dollar Store and picked up some water for the stay and a couple of books to read on the beach.
I took a nap when we got back to the motel while Hubs took a swim.

We used our $40 dinner voucher Tuesday night at a nearby hoity toity restaurant that's been in OC for ages.

Authentic Italian food but the view was non-existent.  Our hotel has a deal with this place for the food vouchers.  The restaurant provides a price fixe menu(one price meal menu)with a small selection of entrees.  Of course it's $20 a person, so your voucher covers dinner for two.  The food was good but I wouldn't say that it was necessarily "worth" $40.  But I am NOT complaining.  It was a deal with the voucher and the place was empty so we enjoyed the peace and quiet.
We had drinks on the balcony of our room and just enjoyed listening to the water and the cool night air.

Hubs was up bright and early each morning to enjoy the sunrise.
Here's one of the photos he took.  This is the only way I saw the sunrise since I don't "do" mornings.....

Part 2  tomorrow.....

Sluggy