December 2009: Captain's Cove, St. Michaels MD

Locating what appeared to be the perfect house for our family reunion, we booked the Captain's Cove for week. The home is tastefully decorated and situated on a quiet road, less than a mile from the small town of St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore. A wide lawn stretches down to the Miles River, where the owner's large sailboat/yatch is docked. One of the things that drew us to this house is the fact that there are multiple buildings: the main house, the pool house and a large barn, which has been converted to a game room on the upper level, and an indoor basketball court on the ground floor.

There is a lovely in-ground pool, which of course was not a factor for us at this time of year. The house has a wood burning fireplace - a definite plus! However there are a couple of things that were not clear from the description on the website, which I point out here.

The house is listed as a 4 bathroom house, which is true, however two of the bathrooms are in the pool house, and presumably because the pool house is not heated in the winter, the water is turned off to those bathrooms. Thus it is a 2 bathroom house, one of which is attached to the Master bedroom on the ground floor, and the other (tiny) bathroom is shared by the 4 bedrooms upstairs. The other thing to note about the house, which is also not apparent from the description, is that the 4th bedroom upstairs is attached to the Queen bedroom. This is fine if the kids in the 'junior twin' room go to bed first, but if they are teenagers who stay up until the wee hours of the morning, this requires them to walk through somebody's room who is sleeping.

The town is small and charming, and while we ate most of our meals in the spacious dining room at Captain's Cove, we did have excellent wood-fired pizza from Ava's . Since we were a large group, we tried most of the pizzas and they were all good - none stand out in my mind to recommend over the others. Of course we wanted to eat crab cakes at some point, but had few choices given the time of year. We had thought to try the Crab Claw restaurant, which was closed, so we ended up at the Town Dock. They have a fine crab cake - lots of crab and virtually no bread crumbs. You can have them fried or grilled, and while I normally prefer the cakes fried, in this case the crab was good enough that grilled was delicious. However, the salad they serve the cakes with is quite unexceptional - mostly iceberg lettuce.

We liked the coffee house right at the entrance to town (if coming from Easton) and while the expresso is rather bitter (the machiato is better) they have great seating areas - little nooks where a group can sit comfortably to warm up and rest weary feet. We enjoyed reading from the Elemental Encyclopedia of Birthdays - a book they keep around for their patrons' use. I definitely recommend a fun moment in this coffee house. Another nice place to go for a drink is the Inn at Perry Cabin. Not surprisingly, they were all decked out with their holiday decorations, and had beautiful Amaryllis bulbs, in addition to lights and a tree.