June 7, 2023 There was no rush to leave this morning, so we slept in. We only had 104 miles to go today. There was an air quality warning on the weather report today due to the wildfires burning in Canada. The skies were hazy.
We left the Cherry Hill Campground at 11:30 and went north on I-95 out of Washington. Traffic was fairly heavy as we made our way towards Baltimore. We can’t fit through either of the tunnels–Harbor Tunnel (I-695) or Ft. McHenry Tunnel (I-95) and Bob didn’t want to drive on the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River, so we had to take the I-695 belt-line northwest around Baltimore which added a few more miles to today’s trip, but oh well! It is what it is. Once we got onto I-695 west, we had a short slowdown due to construction, but it didn’t last long.
The traffic lightened up a bit around Baltimore, but the haze in the sky hung there. We crossed a bridge over the Susquehanna River with an overhead toll. The Susquehanna River flows into Chesapeake Bay just a few miles from here. It was windy going over the bridge and we were very high up.
Before we reached the Delaware state line on I-95, we exited onto Highway 292. Bob knew that the exit off I-95 that we needed to take to get to the campground was closed, so he chose a different path for us. It helps when you do your homework ahead of time. He’s really good about that! We then took Highway 40 to 896 crossing over into Delaware. Highway 896 was a beautiful highway surprisingly so.
The terrain definitely got hillier.
Our campground in Lums Pond State Park is just south of Wilmington and we will be here for 2 days. We arrived at the campground at 1:30.
We pulled into the park, unhooked the Jeep, and found site #57 on our own. The sign said if we had a reservation, which we did, we could go right to our site.
The park has large sites faraway from one another and nice facilities. There is a lot of grassy space for Auggie. We are directly across from the camp store, restrooms, showers, and laundry. The park is quiet with no road noise, but has lots of singing birds. We are looking forward to peace and quiet away from the big city. We relaxed after our drive today. Bob cooked salmon for dinner and we listened to the news about the forest fires in Canada affecting the U.S. Hopefully, the winds will switch and take the smoky air with it. Bob can smell the smoke where we are, but it isn’t affecting us very much now. We’re lucky! Tomorrow we’ll do a little sightseeing of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. The “C and D” Canal connects Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay and is used by the boaters doing the Great Loop. It is also a commercial boat canal.