With all of this talk of billions of dollars in stimulus money being spent across the nation and throughout Maryland, I decided that I wanted to do a hand's-on week-long investigation of the economic recovery in the state of Maryland, if, in fact, there is one. Therefore, I dragged my family kicking and screaming to the Dundalk of the east coast - Ocean City, Maryland.
It helped that we had off on Friday July 3rd as the Federal observation of the 4th of July. Most Americans celebrate the 4th of July as a reason to get drunk and grill meat and light illegal fireworks that were purchased in Pennsylvania - not that most Americans need too many reasons to participate in these activities. Heck, some even know the real premise of the date - the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This year we celebrated 223 years as a free nation.
To get a early start on my investigation we decided to get up at 4am on the 3rd, finish packing the gas-guzzling SUV and throw the kids (literally) into the car and take-off. We hit the road at 5:13, 13 minutes behind schedule.
We were not sure how traffic was going to be. The weekend of the 4th is always the busiest (one of the busiest) weekends of the year. Since we were off on Friday, were people leaving Thursday night? Or Friday morning? Or Friday afternoon? Were the week-long renters still going down on Saturday morning? To hedge our bets we figured the beach traffic would either be heavy or light. And we were right!
We passed Arundel Mills Mall around 5:45 and were surprised to see no police activity in the mall parking lot. By 6am we were nearing Annapolis and passed an odd looking accident. A pick-up truck was smashed up on the roof, windshield, and left-front quarter-panel, blocking the left left of I-97. In response were an ambulance, a fire truck, a police car, and 3 small orange cones safely placed six inches apart 3 feet from the rear of the firetruck.
We arrived at the Bay Bridge at 6:15am and crossed with ease, though I was surprised how many people were already on the road. We continued along U.S. Route 50 through Queenstown, Easton, Cambridge, and Vienna. Though never stuck in a traffic jam, traffic was fairly heavy.
One observation I made was the number of people traveling in the east-bound direction that were of Hispanic decent. My wife suspected that they were going to work. I suspected that most Mexicans don't take folding beach chairs and coolers to work, so I think they were going to Ocean City. What became an initial observation evolved into a game. Every vehicle we passed we would check out the occupants to find out their nationality. Surprisingly, a high minority of them were Hispanic. And a minority of them were high.
Our original plan was to roll into Salisbury and stop at the Burger King. However, my sister-in-law called and asked if we were okay because she heard about an accident near the bridge and everyone within a 5 mile radius died. We assured her it was not us unless heaven had 4 lanes of traffic and miles of cornfields. She also informed us that traffic was very heavy all down Route 50, so I think we were just ahead of the masses. We abandoned our BK breakfast plan quicker than O'Malley abandoned his promise to replace members of the Public Service Commission with qualified individuals. Plan B - press on.
About 30 minutes left in the journey the kids all crashed. Figures. We finally rolled into Ocean City at 8:05am, just as most of the drunks were heading to bed. We made a quick stop at Layton's and got a dozen and a half donuts.
It was at this point that I started noticing tags on many of the buildings. For those that don't speak the street lingo like me, a tag is graffiti indicating your gang association. One message that I saw a lot was "El futuro es hoy." This is Spanish for: "The future is now." Sort of frightening, but considering that we passed most of former residents of Nuevo Leon, I should not be surprised. To top it off I saw an Ocean City DPW truck removing the vintage sign into the city and replacing it with, "Bienvenida a Océano Ciudad."
This is going to be a longer investigation than I anticipated.
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