Delaware Beaches

This is the last of ’em (the beach posts).  It might be the last of the photos for a while, too.  We’re heading back to the Bogs tomorrow.

We took our time going home, stopping occasionally to take short walks along some of the beaches in Delaware. To be honest, I never really gave Delaware much thought in terms of beaches so I was pleasantly surprised to find they have some really nice beaches. The towns are nice, too (more like family oriented towns than beach resorts, lacking in the tackiness of places like, say, Ocean City).

The beaches were fairly big and the search for shells was most productive on the Delaware beaches. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a lot of time to spend walking and looking for shells or I might have come home with far too many of them. One of my favorite activities is walking the beach, looking for shells. I’ve put in many a mile on the beach that way, getting hypnotized by the walking and looking.

Yeah, it looks something like that.

These towers are kind of interesting:

There are 11 concrete observation towers along the Delaware coastline. They were part of the U.S. defenses during World War II. You can read a little about them and how they were used in this article: Looking Back: Downstate Delaware’s Cape Fear.

We eventually made it to Rehoboth Beach where we went in search of the Dogfish Head Brew Pub. Rehoboth is a pretty little beach town. Family oriented. Possibly family-with-money oriented as it appeared pretty upscale.

But it was not without some of the tacky beach town look:

After a drive up and down the main drag, we found our destination:

Dogfish Head makes some wonderful IPA’s (India Pale Ales). As a homebrewer, I have become a bit of a hop head. I love hoppy beers. IPA’s are usually about as hoppy as you can get. IPA’s were originally brewed strong and hoppy to preserve the beer as it made its long voyage from England to the far-off lands of the British Empire (especially India, as you can tell by the name). The typical British dark ales and porters just didn’t hold up well on a 6-month (or more) trip in the hold of a ship. The beer would arrive musty, sour, and flat. Blech. Not very good for the export business. By adding more hops and raising the alcohol level of a pale ale, the British came up with a beer that would travel well.

Side note: Victory Brewing, a brewery near Sabbaticalville, makes an incredible IPA called Hop Wallop. It does, indeed, pack a wallop with an alcohol content of almost 9%. The typical beer, say Budweiser (yuk), has an alcohol content of about 5%.

We had a pint and a very good dinner at Dogfish Head. The food was unexpectedly and surprisingly good after our experience of eating at another of their pub/restaurants in Maryland and finding the food was basically okay, but nothing to write home about. We shared a delicious plate of hummus with fresh veggies, olives, and pita bread for an appetizer. I had crab cakes for my entree. Yummy. M had their jambalaya which was excellent with just the right kick of spiciness.

This vehicle was parked near Dogfish Head:

It had plenty of interesting reading material in the form of bumper stickers. This was one of my favorites:

And so ends our off-season trip to the beach. I highly recommend off-season explorations at the beach. You’d be amazed at how interesting and how much fun it can be.

We arrived back in Sabbaticalville to find the leftover snow from Friday’s storm. I’m not really sorry we missed it.