Assateague Island

We took a two part family vacation last week. The first part, camping at Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland, had been planned for months. Campsite reservations sell out months in advance, but we were able to snag a reservation for a Thursday and Friday (weekends are completely hopeless less than six months out) about three months ago. This was our first time camping as a family, although Jonathan and Lincoln went on the Fathers and Sons campout at the beginning of the summer.

Assateague Island is special because it is home to a herd of wild ponies. Before we arrived I was worried that we wouldn’t see any. That was a needless worry because they were everywhere. 

As we were setting up our campsite some ponies came to scavenge in our neighbors campsite. We were careful to keep all of our food in our car.

Our campsite wasn’t on the beach, but it was very close. The boys enjoyed playing in the water, as they always do.

We kept reminding the boys to avoid the large piles of horse poo laying around everywhere. They thought that was hilarious and would yell, “Look out for the horse poop!” Even when we left the island, Conan would point out piles of rocks and call them horse poop.

During the middle of our first night I was suddenly awakened by the horse neighing right next to our tent. It can be pretty scary to have such large animals just wondering around.

On our second day we paid a visit to the visitor’s center and went on a couple of short hikes. On one hike, called the life of the marsh, we were walking on a boardwalk over some shallow water and we were able to see a bunch of crabs scurrying around. One seemed intent on fighting while another ran from him.

That night we had a big campfire to use up the rest of our wood and marshmallows. It was delightful.

Our last night was not very good, however. We knew it was going to rain before we went to bed and took precautions like putting everything in the tent or the car. Jonathan and I did not get much sleep that night because of the wind and the rain. The tent was getting blown like crazy and I was worried we would need to get out of there quick. Eventually the rain died down and we were able to sleep for a few hours. When I woke up, however, I discovered that we had quite a bit of water in our tent. All our clothes were soaked and my camera was sitting in a puddle of rainwater. We were able to get the pictures in this post off of the memory card, but otherwise I’m pretty sure my camera is completely dead. It was very tragic.

When Conan woke up he got out of the tent and immediately fell in a puddle of water, completely soaking himself. Luckily I had packed the clothes for the second part of our trip in a separate bag that was in the car so he didn’t have to go naked for the rest of the day. We packed up camp as best we could considering a lot of stuff was wet and headed north to our next destination.