Television – "See No Evil" (1977)

What I want

I want now!

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about day one of my two-day trip to northern Delaware, where I rode the bike trail that parallels the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal.  You can click here to read that post. 

On day two of my trip, I first drove to Lums Pond State Park and rode the unpaved loop trail around Lums Pond.  It’s relatively flat and not so rough that you need a true mountain bike to handle it – my new 700x38-tired hybrid did just fine.

The Lums Pond trail is nothing special, but the weather was perfect, the trail was devoid of other bikers or hikers, and I had just refilled my iPod with fresh music.  So I had a very enjoyable ride.

On the Little Jersey Trail
in Lums Pond State Park

It was a short drive from there to St. Georges, Delaware, a very small town that sits almost directly underneath not one, but two C&D Canal bridges.

The St. Georges Bridge, which opened in 1942, is the oldest of the four-lane bridges over the canal:

For the last few years, only one lane in each direction has been open, and only vehicles weighing less than 15 tons have been to use the St. Georges Bridge, which will be closed to all traffic this fall while repairs are made.

The absence of the St. Georges Bridge will hardly be noticed because there’s a much newer six-lane bridge – the Senator William V. Roth, Jr. Bridge – that crosses the canal less than a mile to the west:

St. Georges was smack dab in the middle of the part of the C&D trail that I hadn’t ridden on the previous evening.  After riding west and then returning to my starting point, I took a break and had lunch at the St. Georges Country Store – which is more a bar and music venue than country store.

The former owner of the joint was a merchant mariner who learned to cook in New Orleans, so the store has a real NOLA vibe.  If you’re ever in Delaware and get a hankering for a muffuletta sandwich (complete with olive tapenade) or an alligator sausage po’ boy, get your big-ass ass to the St. Georges Country Store!  

The St. Georges Country Store

For my lunch, I opted for a simple egg-salad sandwich and potato chips.  The $5 sandwich was so overstuffed with the store’s mustardy egg salad that I could barely finish it.

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The eastern terminus of C&D trail – Delaware City, Delaware – was only half an hour’s ride from St. Georges.

Battery Park in Delaware City

There’s nothing fancy about Delaware City (which is home to roughly 1700 souls), but it has its charms – including a quaint little main street and Battery Park, which overlooks the Delaware River and Pea Patch Island.

Pea Patch Island is home to one of the largest migratory bird habitats on the east coast.  

It’s also the site of Fort Delaware, a 19th-century coastal defense fort that was later turned into a prison for Confederate POWs:

You can visit Fort Delaware by taking a short ferry ride from Delaware City.

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After briefly exploring Delaware City, I settled in on the deck of Crabby Dick’s Bar & Grill to enjoy a big-ass beer and the beautiful weather:

Half an hour after leaving Crabby Dick’s, I was back in St. Georges, where I packed up my bike for the drive home. 

Before getting on I-95, I decided to stop at Stewart’s Brewing to replenish my precious bodily fluids.  

I sat at the bar next to a couple d’un certain age, and ordered a beer.  A moment later, the distaff member of that couple leaned forward and said, “Excuse me, but I’m the woman who made your egg salad sandwich today.”

And indeed she was.

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Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers met in 1965 when they were 11th-graders at the Sanford School in Hockessin, Delaware – just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the C&D Canal.  

The two ne’er-do-wells ran away from school together and ended up in New York City, where they changed their names to Tom Verlaine (a reference to the French poet Paul Verlaine) and Richard Hell (a reference to you know what) and formed the band Television.

Television performed regularly at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in 1974 and 1975, and quickly established a cult following.  But schoolmates Verlaine and Hell went their separate ways shortly thereafter. 

I bought Television’s debut album, Marquee Moon, shortly after it was released in February 1977 – which was shortly before I graduated from law school.  

You can call Marquee Moon a post-punk album, or you can call it an art punk album, just as long as you recognize it as one of the most original and influential albums of its day.

The musicians who have cited Marquee Moon as an influence include members of U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, R.E.M. Joy Division, and Echo & the Bunnymen.

Click here to listen to “See No Evil,” the first track from Marquee Moon.  

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Kinks – "Sunny Afternoon" (1966)

Now I'm sitting here

Sipping at my ice cold beer

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal – one of the only two sea-level canals in the United States – cuts through the northern isthmus of the Delmarva Peninsula just south of Interstate 95.  Ships going from Philadelphia to Baltimore (or vice versa) save about 300 miles by using the canal. 

The black oval marks the
location of the C&D Canal

The original C&D Canal, which opened for business in 1829, was only 36 feet wide and 10 feet deep.  The laborers who dug the canal with picks and shovels were paid an average wage of 75 cents a day.

Shortly after World War I, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the canal and used steam-powered dredges to widen and deepen it.  Today, the C&D is 35 feet deep and 450 feet wide, which allows two-way traffic for all but the largest oceangoing ships.

That’s all well and good, but what’s more important to me is that there’s now a nice paved hiker-biker trail that parallels the canal for almost its entire length.

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Now that I’m retired, I have more time for bike rides.  Because I’ve ridden most of the trails that are within an hour’s drive of my house over and over, I’ve expanded my search radius to include rides that are two to three hours away.  

It’s not worth it to drive that far, ride, and then drive back the same day.  (After all, the point of all this is to get out of the car and spend my time on a bike.)  So I’ve been looking for routes that provide enough mileage for two days of riding, justifying an overnight trip.

Lums Pond State Park

The C&D Canal trail, which opened a few years ago, is about 17 miles long.  Less than a mile north of the canal is Lums Pond State Park, which features several unpaved trails, including the eight-mile-long trail that circles Lums Pond.

Combine a round-trip canal trail ride with a ride around Lums Pond and you’re talking roughly 45 miles – which is a good distance for me to cover on a two-day trip.  

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I had to take care of two doctors’ appointments and then visit my mother at her assisted living facility before hitting the road for my C&D Canal ride.  The traffic on I-95 was heavy, which meant it took closer to three hours to get to the trail instead of the two hours it should have taken.  So I wasn’t on my bike until almost 5:00 pm.  But it’s June, which meant I still had plenty of daylight to ride from the canal trail’s midpoint to its western terminus – Chesapeake City, Maryland – and back.

Here’s the Chesapeake City bridge, the westernmost of the five bridges that carry automobiles and trucks over the C&D:

And here’s the Summit Point bridge, which is several miles east of Chesapeake City:

Finally, here's a photo of the vertical-lift bridge that trains use to cross the C&D Canal:

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After completing my ride, I stopped at Stewart’s Brewing in Bear, Delaware, for a beer – or two – and dinner.  

Stewart’s is located in a unremarkable suburban strip mall.  From the outside, it doesn’t look like anything special.  But the food is much better than what I would have expected from your generic brewpub.  

Stewart's Brewing

I ordered the BLT salad – essentially, a chopped version of a wedge salad – and added some ahi tuna to it.  The salad was excellent, and so was the tuna (which had been seared on the outside but was almost as pink as sushi on the inside, just the way I ordered it).

I first tried Stewart’s house-made wheat beer, which is actually made with equal parts wheat and barley.  I followed that up with a pint of Stewart’s maibock, a traditional German-style lager that was sweet and strong enough (7.5% ABV) to qualify as a doppelbock.  Both were distinctive and excellent.

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I’ll tell you about the second day of my trip in the next 2 or 3 lines.  (Wait until you hear about the egg salad sandwich I ate for lunch!)

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My bike-riding excursions often end with me sipping an ice-cold beer while I laze away a sunny afternoon – just like the singer of “Sunny Afternoon,” the 1966 Kinks single that was a top 20 hit in the U.S. and a #1 hit in the UK.

Years later, Ray Davies recalled the day he sat down and wrote the song:

I’d bought a white upright piano.  I hadn’t written for a time.  I’d been ill.  I was living in a very 1960s-decorated house.  It had orange walls and green furniture.  My one-year-old daughter was crawling on the floor and I wrote the opening riff.  I remember it vividly.  I was wearing a polo-neck sweater.

Click here to listen to “Sunny Afternoon.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: