Before the four-mile-long Bay Bridge was completed in the early 1950s, Maryland’s Eastern Shore was physically and spiritually an island, protected by the broad Chesapeake Bay from the sprawling modern cities of Washington and Baltimore, and cut off at its neck by the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Despite the completion of a parallel span in the 1970s, the bridge gets clogged solid each summer by vehicles headed for coastal resorts like Rehoboth Beach (“The Beltway by the Bay”) and Ocean City.
At the west end of the bridge, US-50 lands at Sandy Point State Park, where you can swim, hike, or launch a boat. At the eastern end, US-50 is joined by US-301, and together the two roads race along as a six-lane freeway as far as Queenstown, a busy port in the early 1800s but now little more than an upscale suburb of the greater Baltimore/Washington urban area.
