Day 9, Saturday: Assateague Island
Now, before I get into our experience with Assateague, I have to add the disclaimer that we had a site with electricity. I think my opinion of this place would have been entirely different without AC. Last October, I felt like I won the lottery when I got this site for 5 nights; and we fully appreciated our AC this last week. Even at 9am, it was already hot and humid and there was not much wind coming off of the ocean due to a dune blocking the airflow. The camphost told me it was 102 at her site last month......I would have left without AC.
Anyway, we are Michiganders. Big open water and beautiful clean sand is nothing new to us. I had been to the ocean, my children had not. I thought they wouldn't like the ocean that much just due to salt; and well...my 12 year old was quoting shark bite statistics the night before. No joke, we prohibited Shark Week from the Discovery Channel this summer. Ha!
This place, and watching my children discover the ocean and fall in love with it...it was beyond my expectations. Seeing the ocean through their eyes made my experience richer as well. This was our favorite part of the entire trip. It wasn't just the ponies, although they were pretty awesome too. This place is Simply amazing......
If the waves are this big in Lake Michigan, it's pretty darn cold and you don't swim long. The Atlantic in August in Maryland was warm! The kids fell in love with boogie boarding:
Not bad for a kid that was worried about sharks. He kept saying we had to go out deeper to get to the right spot where the waves would break. :)
They discovered all kinds of life in the sand and water. It makes Lake Michigan look dead in comparison.
I read about these little ghost crabs from a tripadvisor report. Thank you to the person that wrote it. Who would have thought that little crabs came out of the sand at night and littered the beach? How bizarre! They were everywhere. What a unique experience for us. We grabbed flashlights and collected a bucketfull, which we released before we headed back to the campsite.
