Monday, September 12, 2011

Camping With the Horses

Last Tuesday, the girls and I piled into my parents' motorhome with them in the pouring rain and headed to Assateague Island. We drove through rain all day and just as we were getting into Berlin, the town closest to the Maryland end of the island, it stopped raining. It rained during the night at least one of the nights, but didn't rain during the day the whole time we were there. Then soon after we'd left the islands to head toward home it started raining again, and rained most of the way home. Once we got back to my parents' house we found out that during all of that there had been significant flooding near our house and in the Maryland/DC area. We were so blessed with beautiful weather for our beach trip!

We stopped at the visitor center and picked up Junior Ranger books for the big girls. There was a touch tank with horseshoe crabs, and some other fish tanks to look at. And there was a cool wall with an "ocean" scene painted on it. We tried to get a picture of the girls in front of the wall but it didn't work quite as planned . . .
We DID just ask her to sit with her sisters, we didn't specifically SAY to sit facing FORWARD!

Peek! Here me are!!!!

We headed on over to the island, got parked in our camping spot, and headed to the beach.

You can see more beach pictures here.

The mosquitoes were HORRIBLE and I hadn't thought to bring bug spray. They weren't so bad right ON the ocean where it was windy, but as soon as we went back over the dunes to our campsite, they were out with a vengeance. As we were going into the motorhome I saw on on Little Bit's cheek!! It sat there long enough for me to kill it (gently, so I wasn't smacking her across the face LOL) and I knew she was going to have a HUGE bug bite there, sigh . . . it was a SMALL bug bite on her cheek a few months  ago that ended up being a huge deal because she scratched it open and then kept picking at it and the bandaids, even latex free ones, irritated her skin so the skin AROUND the bug bite became inflamed . . . it was horrible! So, I was NOT happy to see that we were going to be dealing with a bug bite on her face again. As soon as possible I pulled out my Naturokit and dosed all of us with the homeopathics for bug bites. As long as I repeated dosing for each new bug bite, they did a great job of keeping the itching away AND the one on Little Bit's face (and the rest, but that's the one that I was most concerned about, and one that would have been a big, nasty one if left alone), dried right up and is already gone! I'm so thrilled with my Naturokit, even the "big" kit is small enough that I carry it in my purse and I have turned to it SO many times!! (no, they didn't pay me to say that LOL). I DID mix up some bug spray that evening, with the essential oils that I always carry when we travel (another thing I highly recommend doing!).

Wednesday we pretty much spent all day at the beach. It was sunny and not too hot or too cold and perfect!!!

Thursday morning we packed up and left the Maryland Assateague beach where we'd camped. We stopped by the visitor center to finish up the girls' Junior Ranger stuff and get their badges. They had a "mini junior ranger" program for Little Bit too, she got a temporary tattoo. Then we drove down the mainland to Chincoteague Island and the Virginia end of Assateague. The touch tank at that visitor center had hermit crabs and welks, which the girls found less intimidating than the horseshoe crabs, so they had great fun with that while Papa got his passport stamp. While we were at that visitor center, the rangers said a storm was coming in, so we decided not to go out to that beach (they said the mosquitoes were really bad there too, which was another deterrent), but headed toward home.

It was a great trip! Perfect weather. Little Bit did really well travelling in the motorhome and the big girls thought it was great to be able to sit at the table and play games and things while we drove (there are seatbelts on the table benches but we hadn't traveled in the motorhome since they were out of carseats.

1 comment:

Cristi said...

It sounds like you all had a good time. We have happy camping memories of Assateague, too -- even though our tent got nearly washed away in a storm late one night.