This weekend was one of the first that my husband has had off in a looong time. So we wanted to go on a mini-vacation (with the price of gas and everything else mini was all we could handle!). We thought about Virginia Beach or even a trip to New York City but then I stumbled across Assateague Island. This island is off of the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland and has a pack of about 300 wild horses that roam the island. Pretty cool right? So here is a map that points out the island. It was about a 3 hour drive for us, which wasn’t too bad but a little more than I bargained for.

But I think you can see on this map that it’s a lot farther to Virginia Beach! So we loaded up our new car, the first road trip we’ve taken in it, with picnic stuff, and ocean/sand play things. I even booked a boat tour of the island so that we could see these horses up close and personal.

Khalil ready to roll!

Now don’t let this picture fool you, Khalil is not the greatest traveler. He’s 19 months old and well sitting in a car for any length of time is just not his forte! But we scurried as fast as we could!

When we finally got there we were a little early for our boat tour so we went to see the beach and walked in the sand. But then it was off to the boat. I thought that Khalil would a) be really interested in the moving boat and looking at the water or b) fall asleep with the boat in the water however c) is what happened, meaning he did neither and was interested in playing with the bouy and anchor and letting out some shrieks.

He did like to look at the horses for about 2 seconds.

I’ll admit it was pretty cool. However I think that because there are so many tourists in the area it doesn’t really seem like the horses are wild. They are sort of small and squatty which comes from living in a marsh more or less for a couple hundred years. Also they don’t seem wild. I think that they have gotten used to having people around, even if it’s not touching them. I guess I thought they would be a bit more jumpy!

This lopsided shack is what they use to bag up clams. There are a bunch of small white sticks in the water if you look close. These are marking off the clam beds. There are nets covering them so that sharks and crabs can’t get in and eat them all up. Then after about two years of growth they are harvested and sold.

Youssef and Khalil with the horses behind them.

When our boat tour was over we headed over to the beach. At first Khalil would not even touch the sand – in this picture he is sitting on the blanket touching the sand. It even took time for him to touch it with his hands.

But with a little coaxing from dad he finally got up the courage to go into it. Youssef would go down to the water and get buckets to dump into their hole. Khalil would walk to the water and throw his bucket at it hoping that the water would get in the bucket and he could take it back. There was no way he was touching it!

But he finally got over that too. By the end of the day we had to drag him out of the water!

We all had a really fun day. By 6:30 we were ready to head home and did. When we got home we all jumped in the shower and went to sleep in no time!