Colonial Beach

We have stopped at Thousand Trails Harbor View, which has an address of Colonial Beach, Virginia (the campground is much closer to Colonial Beach "as the crow flies" than driving).

We were doing some cleaning on Thursday and I used the outdoor shower faucet to rinse off my rubber overshoes... unfortunately, the faucet started leaking...

...so Carl took it apart to try to determine what was going wrong with it...

... and determined that a plastic part was broken and it would be better to just replace the whole thing (it is rather cheaply made).

However, the faucet was now in a situation where it leaked continuously if there was water pressure. We turned off the water pump and the "city" water. We decided to drive to Colonial Beach where there was an Ace Hardware store... we had read that the hardware store was rather "proud" of their inventory (aka it was expensive). Carl did not find what we needed to replace the spigot, and the things he found were pretty high in cost -- but he did find two screw-on plugs (exactly two, no more available at the store) that could be used to close off the open hoses until we could get a replacement faucet.

While in Colonial Beach, we drove on down to the beach itself...

...it is on the Potomac River...

... other folks were out enjoying the day.

Interestingly, the border between Virginia and Maryland runs right along the coast - on Google maps, it even indicates that parts of the beach belong to Maryland. (Technically, from what I read, the border is at the low tide point of the Potomac -- so there shouldn't be any dry land of Maryland on the Virginia side. Maybe the Google maps are not precise in the specification of the border location.)

We saw a restaurant which is on a boat in the river but tied up to shore - it seems that it is a Maryland property, because it had listed that there was OTB (Off Track Betting) available there. I read that there was an issue years ago because there were a number of casinos on boats attached to piers on the Virginia side with slot machines and other gambling which was illegal in Virginia. Virginia lawmakers appealed to Maryland lawmakers and, if I understood it correctly, Maryland made a law that you had to be able to reach the casino boat from land that belonged to Maryland, effectively stopping the practice.

Colonial Beach probably becomes more popular by Memorial Day and through the summer. We were looking for a place to eat and found several closed restaurants. Oh well, Carl was able to get the part we needed to allow us to have running water in the rig, so we accomplished our goal!