Horseys!

For our very first backpacking trip of the year, Guy and I went in search of some warm weather. And a way to use our Golden Eagle Park Pass, because contrary to what my very generous aunt thought when she gave us the pass for Christmas, there actually aren't any national parks within a hundred miles of where I live.

So we drove down to Maryland.

Assateauge Island, specifically.

Backpacking on Assateague Island doesn't really resemble backpacking anywhere else. It has none of the lost-in-the-wilderness atmosphere of our last backpacking trip, I'll tell you that.

It is a little disheartening to be walking mile after mile with a bigass pack on your back while watching people driving on the beach in their cars and setting up their chairs and their fishing poles and their bigass coolers of beer.


And while they were very friendly, I have yet to bum a beer off of someone flying the Confederate Flag.

But after about six miles, we veered off away from the beach, and the scene changed completely. Goodbye Yuengling,


Hello wild horses. We had read that there were wild horses on Assateague, but it honestly didn't occur to us that we would actually see any. But a foal?! A foal seemed like something worth jumping up and down over.
If I actually had the energy to jump up and down, that is.

Much as we loved the horses, they did have their drawbacks.

Ahem. This wasn't quite as bad as the tick-in-pubic-hair incident --by which I mean, no ticks were in my pubic hair. In fact, I didn't get any ticks on me at all. But Guy got, like, fifty. He was freaking infested.






Guy: Ticks.

















Guy: Horseys!





And it was beautiful there. We explored along the marshy coastline, watching cranes and other weird-looking water birds, and more horseys, and picked up more ticks, and drank a lot of wine to keep ourselves from freaking out.


It was so beautiful I was unable to keep my horizons straight.





And in the morning, we came across these:


Little foal prints!



And little foal himself! We got those pictures because the horses, wild though they may be, are trusting souls. That, or they're really lazy. I spent the weekend with "Wild Horses" stuck in my head, and it occurs to me that the guy who wrote that song may have been slightly disingenuous: wild horses couldn't drag anybody away, because they are happy standing still eating their grass and ain't gonna move for nobody. That song just isn't that romantic anymore.

On the way home, we stopped and got crabs. Obviously. We were in Maryland after all.


Yum. And fun. Whatever my calves may say, it was a fun weekend, and we seem to have survived Tick Attack 2007.
Baby horsey!!!!