On the Way To College, But Also the Beach!

 

When you drop your child off at college, you cannot just go back to your hotel room and cry.

Just... I tried that once, okay? It's not a great strategy. Once I got started, I did not stop crying for a week. 

Instead, go somewhere. Anywhere. Ideally, someplace where you can DO something and not just sit, because if you just sit you might start crying, and if you start crying right when you drop them off you won't stop again for at least a week.

So the three of us spent most of the day with the older kid, moving her into her temporary new digs on the campus of the organization where she's going to help crew a tall ship and perform oceanography research later this fall--

--and then the rest of us drove up the coast to the Cape Cod National Seashore. You'll be sad to learn that we didn't arrive in time for me to snag my coveted passport stamp from the visitor's center, but we DID arrive with enough daylight left in the day to have a good, long walk along the shore.

But y'all know why I really wanted to go to a Cape Cod beach, right?

!!!!!!!

I love sharks. I love how they swim, I love the idea of booping them smartly on the nose so they won't bite you, I love tracking them online to see where they're swimming, I love asking people what their favorite thing about sharks is (mine is the Ampullae of Lorenzini!), and while I definitely do not want to get eaten by a shark, I love being somewhere where it *could* conceivably happen!

Last time we were here it was all four of us and we made a day of it. This time, the three of us all planned to stay out of the water and just walk, but as usual, most of us were more careful than I was--

--and somehow I ended up so wet that on the way home I had to sit on a towel like a toddler, but whatever. It's always worth it to touch the Atlantic Ocean!

I've read that since sharks hunt seals, if you see a seal, there's a good chance that there's a shark nearby, so imagine my excitement when we saw this!

Seals!!!

We saw SO many seals on this beautiful evening, and they were all adorable and looked like dogs and surely there were sharks stalking them just out of sight so we basically saw a bunch of sharks, too.

Also, so many pretty rocks and shells that we did not keep because we were on national park property--

--such a beautiful sunset happening on one side of us--

--and on our other side, always more seals!

I still VERY much missed my older kid, but you can't cry when you're walking by the ocean and seeing real, live seals in the wild, and it was nice to have this calm, quiet, lovely time with my younger kid who would be starting her own college adventure in less than 48 hours:

The kid even did me the huge favor of asking for my camera, and then getting some sneaky photos of me as payback for 18 years of sneaky photos of her living her life in the wild:

I look like I'm taking a contemplative evening walk, but I have left everyone behind and am marching along the beach focusing all my mental powers on searching for seals.

Found one!

And then, of course, the poor kid was reminded that even when she's holding my big camera, there's still no escape from the doting mommy photos:

We left at the ideal time, ie. not until my partner was starving, I was soaked to the skin and starting to shiver, and the kid had to pee like crazy.

It was perfect, because nothing less than genuine physical emergencies can generally tear me away from the beach, and by the time we got back to the hotel I, at least, was too tired out to do more than take a hot shower, put on questionably clean sweats, scarf my leftover burrito from lunch, and fall asleep without thoughts of despair about what my life is supposed to look like now that its entire purpose is all grown up and about to leave me alone with just my thoughts for miserable company.

Ahem.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

American Revolution Road Trip: Bay Front Park, Maryland

I was feeling like pretty hot stuff as Matt pulled into the Bay Front Park parking lot; I'd researched this magical place to find fossil shark teeth, found a time when we could go and it would be free (instead of over 50 bucks!), programmed the GPS to guide us there, and there we were, in a small parking lot at the side of a random road outside of a small town in Maryland, just a short hike away from what was going to be a very amazing experience.

(Psst--here's why we were so excited to go here!)

I came down a little bit when we reached the beach and I realized that it was total coincidence that I'd happened to bring us here when the tide was at its lowest, as I hadn't researched THAT at all--oops!

Oh, well! It was, indeed, low tide, so shark tooth hunting we did go!

While Matt and the younger kid walked around a bit and explored and played, the older kid and I became immediately and thoroughly obsessed with finding fossil shark teeth. I handed my camera off to Matt so that I wouldn't drop it in the water, and so most of the photos that you'll see here are his, as he entertains himself waiting for me and the older kid to eventually come out of our shark tooth trances.

He apparently entertained himself in part by finding weird stuff that other people did on the beach.

The younger kid entertained herself by getting cold and wet.

 

And the older kid and I did this!

Our preferred method was to scoop up some of the rocks and sand underneath the flowing water and gently sift it in our hand or shovel, much like we'd learned to do when panning for gold.

But did we find fossil shark teeth, you may be wondering?

We did! We didn't find dozens upon dozens, but in the two hours that we spent there, the older kid and I each found several.

Every time I would decide that we really should go--we still had to drive over to Valley Forge that night!--I'd find another fossil shark tooth, and be re-immersed in hunting, all over again.

Finally, just as the very last rays of sun were hitting the beach, I tore the older kid and myself away from the sharks so that we could take just one walk and experience, you know, the actual beach!

And then it seriously was this dark, so we really did leave!

I have plans to identify, organize, and display the beautiful fossil shark teeth that we collected, but I'll tell you about that another time. For now, put your winter clothes on, because we're headed to Valley Forge!