The Full Pony Experience

Our first day out on Assateague, I had a close encounter with a pony in the parking lot. I was getting into the car to pull out my camera because I had seen a group of ponies on the other side of the lot. By the time I made it to the car, the ponies had made their way across the lot and one passed between my barely open car door and the car next to me. He never batted an eye!

Another day, we found traffic brought to a standstill by a pony clopping down the road at a very leisurely pace. A pony jam!

From the campground, we could see ponies grazing in the marshes on the bay side of the island at sunrise.

Now this pony, I felt sure was a pregnant female, because the horse had big, distended, lopsided belly. The pony was communicating deeply with the van, or else it was sleeping, because it held this position for quite a while. Later, we had very obvious confirmation that it was a male horse, so not pregnant! When we were packing up to leave the beach on our last day, we had to hurry, because this horse was slowly working his way down the parking lot, stopping and snoozing in front of each car. We wanted to get in and get going before he got to ours :)

As great as all these daylight run-ins with ponies were, I have no pictures of our hands-down coolest pony experience. We were woken up, in the tent, one night by the most curious set of sounds: chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, THUMP!, chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, THUMP!

In fact, I wear earplugs when I camp, so I was really just catching the THUMP part, by feeling the impact through the ground. I pulled my earplugs out to hear Justin say very softly, "I think there's a pony out there!" Sure enough, we could just barely make out the shadowy outline of a pony right in our campsite. The horse was browsing, hence the chomping, and stomping the ground about every fourth chomp, probably to dislodge attacking bugs, hence the thumping.

The pony worked its way around the campsite, eventually mowing the grass right in front of our tent. It came within 2 feet of the tent door, easily. I was slightly worried that it wouldn't see my flip-flops, which I'd left right outside the tent door, and munch those, too!

Later the pony worked its way further away, and also pushed its way through several large clumps of brush that separated the camp sites. I was also slightly worried that he'd work his way back through the clump of brush at the rear of our tent and stumble right into us in the dark. But no such luck, and pretty soon our night was pony-free, leaving us with awesome memories :)

Beach & Bay Crabs

Ghost crabs were pretty common on the beach. Here's a big one:


The crabs emerge from holes in the sand, scuttle sideways very quickly, and then return to their holes in the blink of an eye. Because they're basically sand-colored, we thought we were seeing things at first!

We found some crab "dens" where their scuttling tracks were quite evident. One day on the beach, I had a good time with three or four ghost crabs, watching the very tips of the eyes emerge from a hidey-hole, then seeing the crab make a run for it. I'm not sure what they were after, although I did see one latch on to a piece of seaweed and run back into its lair.

On the bay side, we saw fiddler crabs. On the Chincoteague end of Assateague, the Park Service had built a wooden boardwalk out through the salt marshes. The ground was crawling with these little crabs. Fiddler crabs are identified easily by their lopsided claws ... probably the origin of their name, too.

Perspective and History

On the way to Cape Henlopen State Park this weekend, we were diverted off of this bridge onto a secondary road. The only good thing about the horrendous traffic was the opportunity to grab a photo or two. This was shot straight out of the car window :)

During WWII, most of Cape Henlopen State Park was Fort Miles. The U.S. government fortified strategic positions along the east coast, preparing for potential German attack. Fort Miles guarded the entrance to Delaware Bay. The chimney in the picture above rises from a casemate, a large underground storage locker for ammunition. Casemates were covered with sand and native vegetation in order to deceive enemy subs offshore. Today, remnants of Fort Miles are littered across the sand dunes.