Last week, Greg and I loaded up the Honda and headed east to Maryland. Ocean City, Maryland, specifically, to hang out with his family. The weather was on the cool side, so we had only a few beach days. But that left plenty of time for miniature golf, arcades, kite flying and a trip to Assateague.

Ever since I’ve been going to Ocean City, I’ve wanted to check out Assateague, a barrier island known for its wild horses. Since we were there for a full week this time, and since we just finished watching the Ken Burns documentary The National Parks, this was the year to do it.

Anything you read about Assateague Island National Seashore will tell you that there’s no guarantee that you’ll see any horses. Fortunately, we saw three by the side of the road as soon as we crossed the bridge to the island. Then we ran across a whole herd hanging out by the changing rooms at the beach (see top photo). The two horses above were part of that group.

Next we took a walk out to the beach. It was a pretty chilly day, so there wasn’t much activity there (in the human form), but that just made it all the more perfect, in my mind.

There are three hiking trails on Assateague. We walked two of them, the first of which was the Forest Trail, which was part forest and part marshland. At the far end of the path was an overlook where we not only saw horses, but we saw shorebirds and wading birds, too.

I love wading birds. Great blue herons are my favorite, and we saw several with the binoculars. The large white birds are great egrets. Add in a brown pelican and a willet or two and you’ve got bird heaven. I couldn’t have been happier.

So that’s where we decided to take our required “marginally-longer arm” shot.

The next trail we hiked was the Dunes Trail. While most of the trail was sand, the area itself was scruffier than I had imagined.

The parts of the trail that weren’t sand were old road. In 1950, they built a road on the island and sold plots of land for development. In 1962, however, a storm came and wiped things out, and the Maryland portion of the island was made into a national seashore. The old road was left to weather away.

On the crafty side of things, I did make two hatbands for my sun hat in preparation for the trip, specifically for the beach portion of the trip. Whenever I’m near the ocean, I think sharks, and I happened to have the perfect shark fabric left over from Stella’s skirt.

I decided I wanted to go prettier for my other hatband, although this poor fella never got put on since we had so few days on the beach. Maybe he’ll make it on our next beach vacation.