Clarksburg, MD

During our multi-hour drive through the winding roads of West Virginia, and into the still winding roads of backcountry Maryland, we happened upon the tiny town of Accident, Maryland, where we accidentally stopped for an accidentally delicious pond side lunch provided by the tiny town bakery nestled in town. Fueled by melty, fresh-baked bread sandwiches, we rolled into our campsite at Little Bennett County Park late on a Tuesday afternoon.

Little Bennett Campground is a gem of a place – chock full of hiking trails and spacious campsites. If we weren’t in the midst of a global pandemic, it would also offer a plethora of activities of interest to the prepubescent crowd – laser tag, a jumping pillow, pedal carts. This would have been really great for us, as we decided that we’d be taking our nephew and niece on board for a few weeks – and the nephew portion of the smelly kid crew would be arriving while we were parked at Little Bennett.

But, before he arrived, Scott showed up for a bit. After four months of seeing none of our crew in person, we decided to take the risk of adding a few of our favorite people to our bubble.

Being that the Coronavirus continued to ravage the U.S., we didn’t have plans to do much other than walking a few trails and sitting around a campfire with each other.

Which is pretty much what we all did.

When Scott arrived, we fully decontaminated him with straight bleach while wearing Hazmat suits. Which is not at all true – but which we really should consider doing to him, COVID-19 risk or not. We hit a hike, which we later found out wandered pretty close to Camp David, and then took a walk through the nearby city of Frederick.

Frederick seemed really cool, except that we didn’t go in any of the Frederick places, opting for take-out Rita’s ice cream instead. We did enjoy walking along the pedestrian path at Carroll Creek Park while we ate our Rita’s, however. There were baby ducks in the water next to the path, and their duck mother was enjoying a reprieve from them, standing atop a fountain, as they tried desperately to climb the fountain to reach her. I bet she was hoping that the baby ducks failed to find the handy dandy duck ramps that Frederick had placed along the waterway. Basically, I really liked Frederick. It’s the kind of place that employs duck ramps for baby ducks.

In other news, Clarksburg, MD is home to Wegmans. Which, you ought to know by now, is not only my favorite store but also the best grocery store in the world. The presence of two Wegmans near to Little Bennett Campground/Clarksburg may or may have played a large role in us choosing to park Dyna there. We made Scott go to Wegmans with us, even though he lives in the Wegmans homeland. (He’s a spoiled brat.) Living the past 3 months of our lives in small-town bumble-chuck America had its perks. But the availability of decent groceries was not one of those perks.

While Scott and Jake continued to galavant around the general vicinity of Clarksburg, Maryland, I drove the Jeep up to New York to collect my nephew so that he might also join our bubble for a few weeks. He had been pretty holed up since the whole virus deal started spreading its nasty viral load through the states, and we decided that he could use some adventure. Even if that adventure would continue to be tempered by the reality of the pandemic.

I don’t really know what Jake and Scott did while I was in NY fetching Dexter, but I do know they missed out on Dexter’s cat Freddy stealing my couch bed and Dexter donning a full gas mask and bacon footie pajamas during a Subway pitstop on our 5-hour ride back to the RV in Clarksburg from NY.

Scott decided to politely bow out of ‘niece and nephew fest 2020’, and head back to his Wegmans filled homeland. Dexter, Jake, Lucy and I spent a few another few days at Little Bennett, riding the trails, napping in our hammocks, and having a nerf gun war in lieu of being able to play laser tag, before pulling the levelers up to head to our next destination.

County Park, Dexter, Oh Wow! Scott