Day 300: 07/10/2010

It seems like fate says that I must always be taking down a tent by myself in the rain.  And such it was.  Just a light drizzle, though, and warm warm warm.

Kids wanted to go clamming again, rain or no, so we headed back to Assateague, where we saw cool things at the Tom's Cove visitor's center before heading up the trail to a clamming spot.  But we took a wrong turn on the trail, and ended up at a wild pony overlook.

So we saw the ponies.  From a distance.  The only reason I could see them at all was because of my camera lens, even though I don't have telephoto.  Here is our one photo of Assateague's famous wild ponies.  Ponies that everyone we met said usually are all over the place, but because of the heat have been making themselves scarce.  Ponies that, through my nontelephoto, longest, non-IS lens look fuzzy.  But at least we have proof that we DID see them!  Next time we'll make a more concerted effort to see them before the last day.  We were having such a good time doing other things, though!

There were a few Assateague ponies that were domesticated, and we stopped to pet a foal.  The ponies are really quite tiny, but long in the body compared to their height.  Would have been nice to see them on the sand by the ocean, but we have another reason to go back, now!

Then the kids needed to use the bathroom, and we were getting eaten by mosquitos, so we went back to the beach, where the kids decided to look for seashells rather than go back up the trail clamming. 

So we took a walk waaaay up the beach.  There were very few people there, since it had been raining, but at the time that we were there, the rain had stopped, and it was a nice comfortable temperature.  Light breeze, not too hot, perfect.  We slowly walked, looking for shells in the low tide.  If we had only gotten there sooner, we would have found all kinds of shells--but the pros got there first and we kept seeing them walking back with bags of the big, beautiful ones.  We did find a conch shell, although it had two holes in it.  And a pretty blue/purple one that I have no idea what it is! 

Lots of jellyfish washed up on the beach, and I saw one that escaped back out to sea via an outgoing wave.  I could imagine him seeing his opportunity and hightailing it out of there!  He looked pretty relieved to find himself in water again!  Cpt Barry had said that the jellyfish weren't poisonous, so the kids had fun feeling the top of them.  Harder than they had thought!  Adam was hilarious--the look on his face whenever he found something new was priceless.  Pure delight written all over it!

Julia found a patch with thousands of teensy weensy clams of all colours--pinks, blue, white, purple.  Teensy, about half the size of my little fingernail, if that.  They were exposed by the low tide.  It was fun digging them up then watching them turn on their sides and dig back into the sand.  They felt really funny on the palm of my hand, kind of tickly as the wiggled downward.  We played with them for ages.  We weren't prepared for being wet, having left the swimsuits in the car, and we ended up getting soaked.  But what a beautiful, relaxing end to our trip.  We were about five minutes from being back at the car, though, when the skies opened and absolutely poured down rain.  So we got in the car wet, and there was no way of getting to our clothing, which was buried deep in the packed to the brim car.  Didn't matter.  We weren't even to the Assateague bridge heading back to Chincoteague and then out towards home, and the kids were sound asleep.

Day 299: 07/09/2010 The beach and Captain Barry's cruise. And frogs.

What a fun day!  To the beach:

And then, the highlight of the whole trip, a cruise with Captain Barry!  OK, if any of you go to Chincoteague, and you have kids, DO this!  It's not a pony cruise, or a "go around the island and we'll tell you it's history" cruise.  It's a "let's get all muddy and flirt with danger" cruise.  And it's awesome!

Here's Captain Barry:

First he took us clamming:

A  little crab shell that was shed on the crab's way to becoming a soft-shell crab.  Yum.

Digging, digging...

YES!

Then to look at birds at a different part of the bay.

Here's a double crested cormorant, the shellfish police!

Egret comming in for a landing.  These bird photos were taken from far away and cropped in, so they're kind of grainy.

Then looking for shells.  They were all pretty bleached out, but the kids had fun digging through the pile.  I loved this old gum boot.

Captain Barry puts out crab traps, then has the kids haul one in, at which point he gives them plastic pinchers, dumps the crabs onto the deck, and tells the kids to put the crabs into a bin.  You should have seen the kids dance!  Then he does it AGAIN, and has the kids pick them up and dump them overboard.

Then we went looking for fiddler crabs.  I looked up, and there was Captain Barry with my camera!  Course, he didn't know I had it on  manual, so thanks to photo editing, the exposure was corrected.  Whew.

Here are a selection of his offerings, taken from the deck of his boat.

What sun, surf, sand, and wind does to a person's hair.  The look on my face says annoyance, which I wasn't, at all!  A picture doesn't necessarily speak the truth.  teehee.  I was having a great time, messing around with the fiddler crabs and the kids.  Those crabs are lightning fast, but so fun to play with.

The end.

Oh!  We went home after this and made clam chowder from our clams.  Then had a camp fire.  The kids were really tired, and Julia said "I need to go to sleep, but I want to have popcorn and s'mores, too."  So I said she could go lay in the tent, and I'd make the popcorn for her.  So she and Adam headed in there, and Julia started to tell stories to The Bean.  "What would you like the story to be about?  Mermaids?  Seahorses?  Captain Barry?"  Adam chose Captain Barry.  So Julia spun a story about painting Captain Barry's boat, and it was purple, and then the crew wanted to sing, but Captain Barry told them they couldn't sing, they had to work.  And on it went.  I made popcorn as slowly as possible so I could listen to them having such a lovely time together.

Then we had popcorn and went hunting for frogs.  Adam insists that he has "flashlight eyes."  It was great fun chasing tiny little frogs with a flashlight in the dark, catching them, and letting them go.  So very fun.  The little guys were EVERYwhere.  Watching the kids with their lantern racing around was magic.

It was an awesome day!

Day 298: 07/08/2010

Playing catch up this yesterday and this morning on trip photos, now that I have my computer back.  Maybe I should just chuck it and start over, but anyway.  Onward.

We found a swim mask with the nose piece attached, and once Julia put it on, there was no stopping her in the water.  Her biggest thing, it turns out, was water up her nose and not being able to see.  Imagine that.  Once we solved that problem, she was like a little fish.  Of course?  No photos of it.  Hauling everything over to the pool and back was hard enough without the camera too.  This trip wasn't a good "photos of the kids" trip, since I was in the water with them, or too near it/helping them do whatever it was while leaning over it or such to have my camera around my neck.

Later in the afternoon, after doing a little grocery shopping and running a couple of other errands, we decided to go crabbing.  After ice cream at Muller's Ice Cream Parlour, a great, old fashioned place in an old house.  The ice cream was soooo good.  I had a bit of the kids', although having to do the nondairy thing required my getting a Dole something or other.  Also good, but not like the ice cream was!

Then crabbing.  I so wanted pics of the kids doing this, but there was no way.  A couple of times, while I was busy with the line, or threading the chicken neck onto the hook, I wanted to reach out and capture the two of them leaning against the rail with the net, or looking into the cooler squealing at the crabs, but they were over THERE, while I was over THERE trying to keep my loose glasses from falling into the drink!  But we caught about half a dozen or so that were the right size (quite a few more that were too small), and had a ball doing it.

Here's one guy.  He looks a little, well, crabby at the whole process.

So crabby, in fact, and pinchy that there was only one thing to do.  And I did what I have never done before.  Cook a living thing.  I'm sorry to all of you who thought I was a nice, peace loving Canadian who who would never, ever do such a thing.  Julia didn't like the idea at first, and cried and said that nobody cared about living things like SHE did.  We took a vote, and Adam wanted to eat them and got upset about NOT cooking the things.  So it was 2:1.  So I said we could go out again tomorrow and catch more and put them back, but these ones were going to die anyway, since we couldn't put them back in the water that night.  So she agreed that it was OK, although she wouldn't watch.  But then she wanted to see them turn pink.  And then she said she wanted to eat them.  And she ate more than anyone else and firmly indicated that she was over it, and that he tasted really good, too.  And he did!

For the record, Adam wouldn't eat a bit.  Figures.  He had a sandwich for supper.  Which was fine.  By this point, it was almost pitch black, and the following photo was taken by lamplight on the picnic table.

Day 297: 07/07/2010

We spent most of the day at the beach.  Being alone with the kids, it's obvious that I wasn't about to bring my camera down into the water, so I don't have any photos of them there.  The breakers were huge, so I spent much of the time grabbing onto the kids, or being grabbed on TO, so they didn't get swept away in the back tow.  You should have seen their faces when they first saw the ocean, though!  Amazement and awe written all over them.  Then down they ran to the edge of the waves.  Julia got really good at racing the waves back in to shore.  Yes, we made a sandcastle.  Do we have a photo?  No.  Why?  Because it wasn't quite finished, and we had to go up to the bathroom.  While there, the kids decided they'd had enough beach for the day, so we grabbed out things and left before it was decorated with seashell bits and seaweed.  Ah well.  there's always next year, we hope. 

On the way back, we spotted this egret fishing.  What a beautiful bird.  It moves sooo slowly in the water, then BAM!  Like a shot he shoots his head down and grabs a fish.  He worked his way down the patch of water, then swam back up and started again.

Then it was off to see Misty's ranch.  We had read the book last year, and listened to it again on the way down.  The farm was a bit ticky-tacky, but it was fun to see Angel, Misty's grandbaby.  Here she is!

Did I take photos of the preserved Misty and Stormy?  Uh.  No.  That was just strange-o. It was fun to see old photos of all the people and horses in the book, though.  And Misty's saddle, which has been hanging in the barn untouched since she last used it.

A bucket of shells at the house where Misty was kept during the storm.

Back to the tent.  Swimming in the pool, where Julia met a girl her age and had a blast.  Adam is now happy in the water, which is good.  He was really scared at first!  Campfire with smores and such.  Yum!  Bed late.  Ahhh.  It was a good day.

Day 296: 07/06/2010

The photo of the road didn't turn out as nice as I thought.  I'm still figuring out the new lens, and didn't realize until now how shallow the depth of field actually WAS!  But the roads were neat.  Everywhere you looked, crushed seashells.  After I'd been here awhile, I realized there were better examples, where they weren't quite so broken up.  But anyway, this reminds me of it, at least.  They were always sending water trucks around to spray the roads, because they get really dusty.

The first morning when we woke up to the sound of these guys, I thought that it sounded that they were laughing.  And they were.  At the poor sods who didn't have everything under cover at night and woke up to discover the gulls had spread their stuff everywhere!  We had everything under a screened gazebo thing, for which I am grateful we purchased last year.  Otherwise we would have been fighting them off.

When I asked Captain Barry a couple days later the type of gull they were? 

 Laughing Gulls. 

Figures.

Cheeky nuisances.

Insert photos here:

Day whatever it would have been yesterday:  Photos of the seagulls.  Boring?  Perhaps, but where I'm from, they're just plain white and gray, and these ones have cool black heads.  Still annoying as heck, waking us up with their maniacal laughter.  Also a photo of the gravel roads, if you could call it gravel, made from crushed shells.

Day whatever it would be today:  An egret!  Beautiful, beautiful egret fishing.  Could have watched him all day.  None of the kids at the ocean, because the breakers were huge.  I'll try to get some before we leave, though.

This is craziness.  Camera in the car, and it's pitch black, other than my computer screen.  I'm not about to stumble out to the locked car and get the camera (maybe I should have it in here, but if I bring it in, I'll forget to take it when we go out tomorrow, and then it will be in an unlocked space.  I know me).  ANYWAY, they're on the camera, and maybe I'll get them back up.  I'm posting today.  I took the photos and will post at a reasonable time/place.  Is that good?

We spent the vast part of the day at Assateague beach today.  Those breakers were brutal!  But the kids had a ball with the waves.  I was the one who was stressing, because there was quite a back wash, so I was grabbing at the kids a lot so they didn't end up on the OTHER side of the Atlantic!   The weather was hot, record breaking, but a breeze off the ocean made it nice, and it has really cooled down this evening, so we had a campfire and made s'mores and life was good.  We have been told to go out early and walk down the beach to find great seashells, so we're going to try that tomorrow or the next day.  The breakers were too much, and most of the shells were pretty broken up.

Campfire?  Lit the very first time.  Thank you very much!

Bed.  Hardly got any sleep last night, and those stinking gulls woke everyone up at 5:30.  The kids had a fabulous day--really great to each other--which was sooo nice since they were exhausted.   

As am I.

Good.  Night!

Lynn

Update!

We're in beautiful Chincotgeague.  I have been taking a few pictures, but simply do not have time to sit and post, or the kids go crazy.  I'll update when I can.  In the meantime, know that we're doing well, set up the tent in jig-time, just the kids and I (a miracle in it's own right.  Ask hubby, who was with us last time, and he'll tell you what a pain it usually is), and had the foresight to bring an extension cord and fan, so we were actually even quite cool last night--although it's roasty and record highs during the day.  Whew--hot!

Must rush.  Hopefully will be able to post yesterday's photos and today's SOMETIME today!

Lynn