We ended up walking, slowly because 50s, to The Brass Balls for lunch. Sat outside under the umbrellas, with little birds flitting about like ninjas after crumbs left on the floor. And I say ninjas, because they have mad skills without the fuck-it-all attitude that seagulls have. Seriously, have ya’ll been to a boardwalk? In OCMD you will know exactly where Thrashers [Fries] are from blocks away, just by looking at the sky.

So I went for the nachos and Holly did not, sadly, order her usual shrimp in a basket that she always did when we played waitress. She had the chicken tenders. She did not remember that she always ordered the shrimp in a basket but acknowledged that she did, in fact, like shrimp in a basket, and then she laughed when I told her it always pissed me off that she never ordered anything different.

We met up with Todd and two colleagues for dinner at Liquid Assets, which was fantastic. Highly recommend if you’re ever in town – even if it’s just for the doughnut dessert. I implore you to at least go for that.

Todd and I did the usual things we do at the beach – walking on the boardwalk, watching the sunset at The Ropewalk (I don’t care what people say about that place, it’s got good bartenders and an even better view), eating dinner at The Hobbit, sunset dinner at Mackey’s, hanging out at Bull on the Beach, and wrapping up our nights at the Salty Dog. I love mini-golf but we didn’t go this time, and we didn’t buy any fudge because we still have some leftover from his trip in April.

Our first night we didn’t arrive until after 10 p.m. and after checking in we decided to walk to the Salty Dog. We sat down to a half-empty bar and ordered cheesesteak egg rolls and bacon cheese fries and ate ourselves stupid until well past 11. I haven’t gone out for the night this close to 11 p.m. since I lived in New York some thirty years ago. Reclaiming my youth, maybe? Only until the next day when my careening-toward-senility-status emerged once again.

We were enjoying some light conversation when three guys came in, stood next to me and ordered three beers. Todd was explaining Keno to me when the one guy asked the bartender for three shots of Tito’s. “No, man, your buddy is throwing up all over the bathroom and my coworker has to clean all that up.”

The Salty Dog used to be a hopping place back in the 90s – my first trip to OCMD was in 1992 with a bunch of friends and this is one of the places we’d go because it was near the one guy’s rental we stayed at. I recall the bar ran the length of the place on the left and the DJ booth was just inside the door to the right. It was always wall-to-wall people. It’s where I first saw DJ Batman (RIP).

Today feels a lot more tame, the owner having taken over in 1999 and renovated it to have more seating for service. Years later he expanded into the old Pizza Hut next door, which became Dry Dock 28. Also cool – family-friendly, TVs for sports and good food.

We went to breakfast at the Dough Roller next to the Convention Center the next morning so Todd could unload all the equipment afterward. My Western omelet was $17.50 and came with a short stack of pancakes because Americans are overweight gluttons. The bathroom –at 8:30 a.m. -had one user’s worth of toilet paper left (I was the lucky one) and no paper towels to dry your hands (and no electric dryer). WTAF.

Maryland is a legalized state so there’s an abundance of incense burning everywhere – the streets, the hotel hallway, the balcony, even on the no-smoking boardwalk. It bothers me but it doesn’t. I grew up around it – my mom and stepdad were active users, and for this reason I never had much of an interest in it. Todd hates it. So much so, it nearly ruined our trip to San Francisco, but that’s another post (I think I already wrote about).

I’m more troubled by passive cigarette smoke nowadays. My Nana (and also my stepdad) was a smoker and I spent a great deal of my childhood with her. I always went with her to the CB radio parties in the 70s at the local firehouse where folks would gather in a haze so thick it was like sitting among the clouds.

Cigarette smoke was (and still is) a powerful, almost comforting, olfactory memory – my first love was a smoker too. I bartended in the restaurant for years before the no-smoking ban. Then came the reports of second-hand smoke cancers and I became more anxious about my exposure to it.

So when some bitch set up camp a few yards from my spot on the beach and lit up a cig – I stifled the urge to tell her there’s no smoking here and so I just shot her some dirty looks (which, surprisingly, were not as effective as I’d hoped) and packed up my shit and went back to the hotel. I had also forgotten my hat that day so it was probably for the best anyway.

Miscellaneous

If you’re planning on walking the boardwalk more than a block, don’t forget not to wear flip flops.

Likewise, when you’re going to sit on the beach, try to remember your hat before you’ve traveled down 4 floors on an elevator and halfway across the hot sand.

A lot of the servers in OCMD seem to be majoring in Business Management and/or Communications.

The Bus is crowded between the hours of 4 and [pick any late hour]. It’s still safer than driving, even if you have to sit entirely too close to a stranger for part of the ride. I prefer to stand so there’s no accidental “touching.” New Yorkers on the subway, in such close quarters to thousands of other humans, have made not touching another body an art form. Ordinary folks from western PA don’t seem to understand how this works.

The doughnut dessert at Liquid Assets is called the Ice Cream Sandwich: two house-made doughnuts, vanilla ice cream, and … bourbon caramel sea salt sauce.

The Bayside Skillet is delicious and expensive AF. Our bill for the two of us, with tip, was $72. BUT – they have fresh-squeezed juice and crepes seem to come with everything. Better than a short stack. *edited to clarify that the juice does NOT come with the meal.

Fried Shrimp platters run about $23 locally here and come with fries and cole slaw. In the 1970s the price was $1.75 with the same sides included according to my Google research that found a menu from Honey’s in North Carolina.

There is a restaurant chain called The Shrimp Basket that began in Gulf Shores, Alabama in 1993 and now has multiple locations across Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. Their shrimp basket is currently $18.75. Per the website, it was founded “to create a restaurant where people would feel welcome to be themselves, families could afford to dine out together and strangers would leave as friends.” Girls trip, Holly?