Yesterday, we were at Tangier Island, VA. No cell phones, so no internet to blog.

Tangier Island is a real fishing village island in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. It really is what you'd expect a small fishing village to be. Every other little village we have seen on the mainland has been cutsied up to attract more tourists and doesn't have much fishing industry left, but Tangier Island is a one industry, crab fishing island. It's the only industry on the island other than selling to the crab fishing families, the few tourists and the airstrip people. It's so small that the one little village is all there is room for. There is a small airstrip and there's a dock where a 15 cabin "mini cruise ship" can stop a few times per year. There's also a daily ferry service to the mainland. It has been so isolated that the people here still speak with an English accent derived from their English heritage before the Revolutionary War.

There are no cars on Tangier Island. Everybody gets around the teeny little streets on golf carts, many of which are enclosed with canvas and plastic window curtains. We rented a golf cart for $25 all day. The streets are barely two golf carts wide so you have to pick a wide spot to pass and go slow. This is actually a very wide street called "Main Ridge St." where many houses, the church, some restaurants, and some very sparse tourist shops are. There are many other streets only wide enough for one golf cart. We did see 2 trucks and some construction type vehicles at the airstrip location.

This is the only restaurant that was open, although there were 4 others and an ice cream shop that were closed because the tourist season, such as it is, doesn't start until next week or so. We had a noon dinner here and it was family style with ham, rolls, pickled beets, potato salad, corn pudding (quite good), clam fritters, crab cakes and pound cake dessert. There was one big table and 4 tourists and 4 crab fishermen all ate together. I believe this is the largest house on the island. The azaleas were also in prime bloom on Tangier. We seem to be following the prime Azalea bloom days North with Spring.

The entire South end of the island was a mile long beach. We were the only ones there although there were some others just leaving as we got there. You have to park your golf cart and walk across a very rickety low bridge across the tide channels to get there. Nice beach but few shells here.

A pink moon! I just had to put in these two pictures because I've never seen this before. There was a pretty red sunset in the West and at the same time, there was a moonrise in the East directly opposite the sunset. For 5 or 10 minutes while the moon was low, it was reflecting the red light from the sunset and was therefore a large pink moon. I've seen lots of orange and yellow moonrises, but never pink! All the boats in the foreground are the crab fishing boats. There were about 50 of them on the island. Almost all of them went out at 4:30 AM the next morning. We were awakened by many diesel engine sounds and it was like a LeMans race start in slow motion as they all put-putted out down the channel to sea.