With spring here, many folks may feel like getting out and about.  If you want a taste of quaint, quiet rural village life in a spectacular waterfront setting, I recommend visiting Whitehaven.

My wife and I spent last weekend there, on the banks of the Wicomico River.  Saturday was sunny, but a bit brisk.  Sunday, however, was gorgeous.  

We stayed at the Whitehaven Hotel, pictured at left. 

Originally built in 1810 as a road-house or private home, it was expanded and converted to a hotel around 1877, when this village was a bustling riverfront town, with a cannery, shipyards and several stores.

It gradually deteriorated - I can remember seeing it boarded up, with paint peeling, in the late 1980s, when passing through town - but was spared from the wrecking ball and restored several years ago.  It's a bed & breakast now. Innkeeper Cindy Curran greeted us, showed us around and generally made us feel at home. Great breakfast, very quiet, and spectacular views.

The hotel is right on the river, where several times a day you can see tugs pushing barges loaded with fuel and other cargo up and down the river.   There's a free ferry there, too, one of the few left in Maryland, that stays busy through the day, weather permitting.  My colleague Rona Kobell wrote a feature about the ferry a couple years back, that you can read here. You can see the ferry below. It was so gusty on Saturday that it wasn't running. 

We walked around town, taking in the peace and quiet.  The old two-room schoolhouse has been converted to a museum and community center, where we met Jefferson Boyer, the local historian and publisher of a chatty monthly newsletter.  He regaled us with tales of the village, which has about 30 full-time residents. The population swells a bit on weekends and in summer, as several houses are maintained by out-of-towners.

You can also see plenty of waterfowl.  We saw ducks, cormorants, great blue herons, a bald eagle (spotted by my wife and other guests at the hotel, but not me), red-winged blackbirds and a profusion of other songbirds.  Heard geese in the distance, too.

And, of course, it's hard to miss the ospreys, which nest directly across the river from the hotel, atop a pole at the ferry landing on the Somerset County side of the Wicomico.  Apparently they can't read the "No Trespassing" sign below.

The birds don't seem to mind the ferry, or the cars and trucks that pass right below its nest.  But people afoot get the birds jumpy.   I managed to snap one's picture before it flew away.

There aren't any stores in Whitehaven, but there are two restaurants nearby, the Red Roost in town and Boonies, about 10 minutes' drive away in Tyaskin.

After staying overnight at the hotel, we took the ferry across to Somerset and followed a scenic route through a landscape of farms and forests.  Plenty of chicken houses to be seen there (and smelled here and there, as growers spread "litter" from the houses on their fields to fertilize new crops).

We stopped off in Princess Anne, Somerset's county seat, where there was a daffodil show going on not far from the impressive campus of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. 

Such a lovely weekend, we plan more jaunts through the spring and summer.  I'll share them here, resuming the local travel notes begun by my colleague Rona.