STINK BOAT MOB AND MORE

Located on our way to our sailboat, Chesapeake City, MD is a favorite stop for both my wife and me. She likes the unique stores and I like the architecture and layout of the town, as well as a very excellent cafe, The Bohemia Cafe. Every year this canal town, has their "Canal Day" celebration. Besides the crafts, food, and music, this event has been co-opted by Stink Boaters (motor boaters, as opposed to us Blow Boaters) who have turned the event into their version of an Eastern Shore Mardi Gras, replete with the public inebriation and nudity. Fortunately, we when early and missed most of the worst behavior, although folks were already hitting the sauce at 9:30am so things didn't bode well for later. If you are wondering, we arrived by car and not by boat. The anchorage basin fills up almost to the point you could walk across it on boats. I counted 3 sailboats out of hundreds of stink boats.

My wife enjoyed the crafters and ended the day with several shopping bags full. The crab cakes being sold by the Grace AME Church were beyond outstanding - about two inches thick with almost no filler, lots of big chunks of crab. Normally we would have headed to our boat but we had a BBQ to attend at home Saturday. I shot a photo of a neat water tower in North Chesapeake City - the vessel is a sphere as opposed to the usual cylinder with elliptical ends. We stopped in Wilmington, DE on the way back home at a train store on Rt 202. I forget the exact name of this store but basically it was opened by some of the folks that used to work in the train department at the famed Mitchells. Most of the remains of Mitchell's inventory ended up here and they have continued in the tradition of stocking some unique European model train items in addition to your normal American lines. I purchased two back issues of "Narrow Gauge & Industrial Railway Modelling Review" and two BEMO HOe cars. BEMO is a German company and most of their products are HOm or HOe. HOm is meter gauge so it would be close to HOn3 but not interchangeable. HOe is basically HOn30. I bought a gondola that should work well on the steel mill narrow gauge system and also some kind of cement car I think - I need to research this one a bit more as it might be too modern, but I thought it looked neat anyway. I shot a photo of these two cars sitting in the future ingot stripper yard.

As far as modeling, just a bit of work on the large crane for the A-furnace topworks.