Chesapeake Bay

CAPE CHARLES, Va. —  The sky was overcast and the afternoon air muggy. The only sound was the whirring of our bicycle wheels as Wendy and I pedaled down a country lane past soybean fields and white Victorian farmhouses.

“This is great!” Wendy said, about 10 minutes into our bucolic tour of the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland.

Except for the dogs. Seemingly out of nowhere, a giant black farm dog materialized

alongside me, a blur of legs and teeth, barking just inches from my ankle. It resembled the Hound of the Baskervilles. And it was fast.

“Whoa!” I yelled as we geared up to warp speed and finally flung ourselves out of our pursuer’s orbit.

That was the first of many encounters with the unexpected--including a roadside rescue of a kitten, which we placed later with a local resident--during our two-week bicycle trip through the historic rural peninsula that forms the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Fortunately, nearly all the surprises were delightful.

Wendy and I, both fortysomething editors and weekend cyclists from the Los Angeles area, discovered the peninsula by accident. We were looking for a self-guided bicycle adventure that would roll us into Washington, D.C., for a conference.

I was the bicycle touring “veteran,” having pedaled for a week in my 20s through southern Illinois on my own, but Wendy was the more gung-ho cyclist, accustomed to racking up 50 miles a day.

We didn’t bother to look up organized tours (there are a couple), preferring the adventure of navigating unknown places and the freedom to stop when and where we wanted. But we did scour bookstores. From guidebooks we learned that the Eastern Shore is full of early American history--and that few tourists visit the Virginia end. That intrigued us. We also found topographic maps, which guided us throughout the trip and yielded a critical fact: Unlike much of Virginia, the marshy peninsula is flat. That clinched it.

We packed and loaded our wheels--a mountain bike and a lighter-weight “hybrid”--onto a flight to Virginia Beach, Va., terminus of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel that funnels traffic to the Eastern Shore’s southern tip. Cyclists are banned from the 17.6-mile-long structure--the world’s longest bridge-tunnel. An intercity bus that crosses the bridge will take boxed bikes for a fee. But we made friends with a hotel employee, who whisked us across in his truck, and we were on our way.

What we found on the shore was a bit of Brigadoon.

Explored by Capt. John Smith and settled by the English in the 17th century, the peninsula is studded with Colonial and Federalist architecture and supports a culture of “watermen” who ply the 200-mile-long bay--the continent’s largest estuary--for blue crabs, oysters and clams.

The southern Virginia portion, largely isolated from the mainland until the bridge-tunnel opened in 1964, is a piece of forgotten small-town America. Its 50,000 people are scattered over more than 100 tiny settlements.

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A couple of hours after outrunning the dog, we pulled into our night’s lodging and encountered our amiable host.

Retired schoolteacher Robert Rittenhouse has operated the Rittenhouse Motor Lodge, which he built himself in tiny Cheriton, Va., for four decades. The 13-unit motel isn’t fancy ($45 per room), but it has a lovely wooded setting.

We dined up the road at Someplace Else, a funky bar and steak place where the beer was bone-chilling cold and the food was . . . priced right.

The next day, we biked west to Cape Charles, a faded port founded in 1883 as a major railroad terminus and ferry dock and now bypassed by interstate traffic. It has some lovely 19th century homes and a public beach and boardwalk. But in the October off-season, when we were there, it was sleepy enough to seem caught in a twilight zone between ghost town and real town.

To enter a real way-back machine, we pressed on to Eastville, founded in the 17th century and said to have the oldest continuous court records in the United States, dating back to 1632. On this Friday, a clerk at the Northampton County Courthouse was happy to pull down the heavy, hand-written volumes for us. One of them recounted the public reading of the Declaration of Independence on Aug. 13, 1776; it took a few weeks for the document to arrive in the county.

Bad knees--mine were weary after 37 miles of pedaling--brought us to an unexpected halt in Exmore (population: 1,115), one of the Virginia Shore’s bigger towns and home to the Trawler Restaurant, the region’s only dinner theater. Here we enjoyed catfish dinners ($9.95) and then joined about 150 others watching “Hymn to the Chesapeake,” a passionate, sea-soaked reverie on the lives of watermen based on Robert P. Arthur’s book of the same name.

In Exmore, we also met Martha and Grayson Duer of Martha’s Inn, the first of many bed-and-breakfast hosts on the trip who epitomized Southern hospitality. For $60, we took a cozy room in their unusual 1936 brick mansion, which has a dramatic spiral staircase, a seven-headed shower and a resident bull terrier named Gatsby.

Our days soon took on a routine: up about 8 a.m., a leisurely breakfast and then on the road about 11 a.m. for several serene hours of riding through farmlands. We averaged about 30 miles a day.

Among our other Virginia stops were Onancock, an exquisite, 300-year-old town and summer ferry port whose venerable homes and willow trees are mirrored in placid Onancock Creek; and tiny Accomac, said to be Virginia’s richest store of historic architecture outside Williamsburg, where we took a 1 1/2-mile self-guided walking tour past homes dating to 1788.

By Day 5, we had reached the most famous place on Virginia’s Eastern Shore: Chincoteague, home of the annual Pony Swim. Every July, wild horses on Assateague Island are rounded up and driven across the narrow channel to Chincoteague Island, where some are auctioned off to benefit the local fire department. The event draws tens of thousands of tourists.

In the off-season, Chincoteague is a charming, sleepy town and a good base for exploring the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, the marshland home of the horses and more than 300 migrating and native bird species. This is a bicyclist’s paradise, threaded by miles of paved roads where cars are banned until 3 p.m each day.

The refuge also has miles of beaches, where we ditched our bikes for a long, sandy stroll. As we crossed the bridge back to town in the late afternoon, a flock of Canada geese in V-formation sliced through the sky--a perfect goodbye salute.

Across the peninsula from Chincoteague, about 50 miles via back roads, lies Crisfield, Md., said to be built atop countless oyster shells culled from Tangier Sound in the town’s 19th century heyday as the “seafood capital of the world.” The port is still home to a vibrant shellfish industry, now mostly blue crabs. Although a working town, it has spots of elegance, including an exquisitely restored Queen Anne bed and breakfast named My Fair Lady, where we stayed two nights ($82.50 for room with bath).

The last few days of our trip explored areas more accessible to day-trippers from the mainland, notably the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and the waterside cities of Cambridge and St. Michaels.

In Cambridge, arriving at a local festival, we took a two-hour sail on a replica of a skipjack, the small oyster-dredging vessel billed as America’s last working sailboat. Only a handful still operate, from nearby Tilghman Island. And in St. Michaels, we found the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (entrance fee, $7.50), a marvelous collection of indoor-outdoor exhibits on the bay’s waterfowl, commercial fishing and boat-building industry. The highlight was an 1879 lighthouse, moved intact from Hooper Strait in the southern bay.

St. Michaels was our first upscale tourist town on the Shore, with a spectacular harbor, fancy shops and prices to match. Indeed, as we went farther north, toward more prosperous areas, the rural ways began slipping away. Gated estates with long driveways replaced working farmhouses. Motorists stopped giving us friendly waves; a few even “buzzed” us.

By Day 13, when we got to Kent Island, where the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bridge stretches toward the mainland, Brigadoon had evaporated into suburbia.

The next day, we crossed the span, which bans bicycles--again with the help of a hotel employee--and rode on to Annapolis, Md., and then Washington, D.C., where we caused quite a stir when we arrived late at our conference’s formal cocktail reception--still in our bicycling duds.

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GUIDEBOOK: Eastern Shore Byways

Getting there: American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, TWA, United and USAir go to Norfolk, Va., and Washington, D.C.; all connecting service. Nonrefundable, advance-purchase fares start at about $470 round trip, flying out of LAX to Norfolk and returning from Washington. (Norfolk is the nearest airport to our starting point, Virginia Beach, Va.)

Bringing your bicycle: Airlines typically charge about $50, each way, to transport a passenger’s bike. It must be in a box, with the pedals removed and handlebars turned parallel to the frame. Most airlines sell boxes for $10-$15 at the airport. Renting bicycles: Bay Bicycles, 4837 Shore Drive, Virginia Beach, Va. 23455; tel. (804) 464-4534; $75 per week.

City Bikes, 2501 Champlain St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009; tel. (202) 265-1564; $90 per week.

Where to stay: Rittenhouse Motor Lodge, Route 13, Cheriton, Va. 23310; tel. (804) 331-2768; about $45 per room.

Martha’s Inn, 12224 Lincoln Ave., P.O. Box 606, Exmore, Va. 23350; tel. (804) 442-4641; $60-$75, including breakfast.

Island Manor House, 4160 Main St., Chincoteague, Va. 23336; tel. (804) 336-5436; $70-$120, with breakfast, tea.

My Fair Lady Bed & Breakfast, 38 W. Main St., Crisfield, Md. 21817; tel. (410) 968-3514; $85, including breakfast.

Kemp House Inn, 412 Talbot St., Box 638, St. Michaels, Md. 21663; tel. (410) 745-2243; $65-$105, including breakfast.

For more information: State Bicycle Coordinator, Virginia Department of Transportation, 1401 E. Broad St., Richmond, Va. 23219; tel. (804) 786-2964. Bicycle Affairs Coordinator, Maryland State Highway Administration, 707 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, Md. 21203; tel. (410) 333-1663.

--J.E.