It just started out as an innocent day trip to Salisbury, Maryland to deliver some maritime books I wanted to donate to the Ward Museum of Wildfowl Art... but my friend Lora had other plans.  To be fair, I had requested a cultural experience (mostly of the food variety), but she went for the full package:  a trip to Ocean City.

We started at the Harborside, an OC institution and home of the Crab Club, pictured here.  This is a crab lovers dream, or nightmare perhaps, consisting of a generous crab cake on the bottom and a friend soft shell crab on the top, with the usual club sandwich accompaniments in between. (We opted out of the bacon, though, the better to savor the full crabby flavors.)

We then hit the boardwalk, which was crawling with August humanity.  Our destination was Trimper’s, a historic amusement arcade/park with some amazingly well preserved and somewhat scary features.  (Including the extensive shooting range featured above.)  After touring the sites, both historic and more contemporary, we gathered our quarters and embarked on some skee ball action.

Somehow, even though I have reached a fairly advanced age and have visited a many seasides, I had missed the experience of playing skee ball.   I found that I had no aptitude for the game whatsoever, but it was fun nonetheless.  After spending about two dollars worth of quarters trying to improve, I gave up and donated my meager stock of tickets (which you win for scoring a certain amount of points) to my intern Alison to add to her own so she could cash them in for a cheesy prize.

Crabs, check.  Boardwalk, check.  Skee ball, check.  Beach?  Well, we saw it in the distance, which was good enough.  All in all, an excellent day in OC.