So, on to the story of Assateague... If you have not heard of it, the north half of the island is in Maryland and the southern half is in Virginia. Now, Kirk and I actually studied abroad together in Oxford, England in 2002. We both went to UGA and Kirk went to medical school at Emory University. He's working in New York and interested in working in the field of pain management eventually. For those of you who don't know, Kirk and I have a history of outrageous trips together including adventures in Ireland and Ravens Cliffs in GA. This trip is no exception.
I picked Kirk up at the Metro Center metro station in DC on Saturday afternoon and we began the 3-ish hour trip to the island. Upon arrival, we had to quickly don our 45-ish pound packs (we did not pack light) and walk the few miles down the beach to our campsite. Walking with weight on your back on sand is kind of like taking 2 steps forward, 1 step back. It started getting dark and we were worried we wouldn't make it to the campsite before the sun went down. Luck was on our side, though, and we found a lovely spot just off the beach. After setting up our tents and enjoying some delicious Velveeta shells n' cheese, we walked down to the bonfire on the beach and met some local boy scouts. We learned from their leaders that there was actually a beached humpback whale a few miles down the beach and in the dunes. We immediately knew what our adventure would entail the following day.
Unfortunately, neither of us slept very well that night. While it was pretty lovely during the day, it became insanely windy at night, so much so that my tent was at a 45 degree angle and one of the stakes holding my rain fly down came up, meaning that my rain fly was flapping around like crazy the entire night, making such a racket that it was difficult to sleep! The fact that the temperature dropped nearly below 40 did not help.
So, after a long night of being freezing and half-awake due to the wind, we woke up to a gorgeous fall day and went for a walk on the beach, forgoeing breakfast because we did not feel like cleaning our bowls full of oatmeal. We did enjoy some hot English Breakfast tea and then took a long nap on the beach! Later that morning, we were lucky enough to witness, literally, the Great Migration! We heard what sounded like tons of geese right over the dune from us and kept looking around for then. Apparently, we were not looking high enough. One of our scout leader friends came over to point us in the right direction-miles away and miles higher in the sky- we saw hundreds of thousands of "V"'s of geese! There were so many of them that even though they were super far away, it sounded like they were close. For as far as the eye could see for about 15-20 mintues, "v's" and "v's" of geese passed through the great blue younder. Everytime we thought we'd seen the end, there would be more! It was absolutely stunning and something neither of us had ever seen before.
After our inspiring bird-sighting, we donned our packs and went in search of the beached humpback whale. Our curiosoty lead us through the marsh trails to the bay-side of the island where we had our first "pony" sighting! Many people call them "ponies" but apparently they are indeed horses, just a little bit more squat than a horse we're used to seeing today. We saw about 6 across a great field of marsh, and walking a little bit further down the trail, came within about 100 feet of 2 beautiful horses! We were so close, we could hear them breathing and chomping away at the grass. All we could think was "don't they have the life!" as the wind was blowing their manes, they enjoyed the fresh ocean breeze and munched on miles of delicious treats.
Pretty much the whole hike back to the car we were both a) looking for the beached whale and b) talking about the Chex Mix we had left in the car. Unfortunately, we did not come across the whale and our hunger got the best of us! I took this short video as we were driving out of the park. We spotted a pony along the road and we were so hungry that we couldn't stop munching on the Chex Mix even for a moment to look at the pony! Here Kirk munches away, joking how he is also eating!
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