Segment 3: Approaching DC

Annapolis, Maryland

It occurred to me that the area east of Chesapeake Bay - small towns, Delaware, and the ocean - is very different from the area on the west, which includes Annapolis, capital of Maryland, plus Baltimore and Washington, DC, two of the largest cities in the US. So I wondered if the locals have a way of referring to the two sides, like the way we referred to Oakland and Berkeley as the East Bay, and I looked it up, and they do: Eastern Shore and Western Shore.

Eastern Shore was the last segment; we are walking the Western Shore now.

Annapolis, founded in 1649, is right next to the bay, as you can see in the picture, and it is home of the US Naval Academy. From Annapolis, we head west (we will do a lot of heading west for the next few years) toward Washington DC via the town of Bowie. On the American Discovery Trail website is this comment about this stretch of the trail:

"The Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis rail-trail is planned for completion in 2008 and this trail, known as the South Shore Trail, will become the permanent ADT route." [italics mine]

So there is a comment sitting out there about an event that was supposed to happen 15 years ago, and it made me wonder about something I thought about when I was considering taking this trail and was researching it: Is this trail just some big marketing effort, and has the effort been abandoned? And the answer seems to be no, not quite abandoned, but three of the last four "Latest News" posts on the website are quarterly newsletters going back to Autumn 2022, so it seems kind of quiet over there. However, there are stories on the Internet from the last few years, so some people are using the trail.

From Bowie, it is only a few more miles to the town of Greenbelt, a suburb of DC and a planned community built during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Next to the town is Greenbelt Park, which is administered by the National Park Service and has places to camp, and here is the end of the third segment.

We are only about 10 miles from Washington, DC, and the next segment is only 17 miles long, which will take 3 or 4 days.

Walking conditions are near-perfect these days, and my progress has been good: about five miles per day and over 300,000 steps for the month already. Looking at a map of the US, it looks like Washington DC, which I have not reached yet, is way over there on the right side next to the Atlantic Ocean, barely away from where I started. And it is, but previous experience tells me this is the way, and one day I will be all the way across if I just keep walking. By the time I reach Ohio, which will be next Spring and only about 1/8 of the way, it's going to feel like I am getting somewhere.