Ocean!

We had a great vacation! Every morning at the crack of dawn, Oob would wake us up and get us out of bed.


Off we would go to the beach (a block and a half walk).




We spent a lot of time chasing waves, looking for shells and digging.








This was the first year we had three confident swimmers, and they had a marvelous time!













Choclo loved to play in the waves.



Oob preferred digging in the big sand box, but he liked the water if the Emperor played with him!









Leena and Klenda were mermaids.

We found lots of shells and a very strong jetty. (Why so strong? It was covered with mussels...)

We also had a great time at the beach house.

We had brought the Eyeclops (a portable microscope that plugs into a TV), and we looked at all the shells and sand and other things we found at the beach.


We did a few experiments, mostly looking at sand and shells reacting to vinegar. We determined that most of the sand was composed of rock.

I had hoped to do a bunch of stuff with seaweed (we had found 5 kinds of seaweed at this beach last year), but we couldn't find any!

I had wanted to see if we could find plankton, but we never got the Eyeclops and the seawater together while it was fresh.

I did bring back some sea water to do density and salinity experiments, but I haven't gotten to it yet...

Thursday, we visited this very cool shipwreck museum on Fenwick Island and ended up talking to the owner, Dale Clifton. As it turned out, he was the one who had actually collected all the stuff we were looking at!

He let us hold a fork he'd recovered from the Titanic and a gold chain made for the Queen of Spain in the early 1600s. After we had all held it, he casually mentioned that the chain was worth three quarters of a million dollars. Wow!

The museum is a fantastic set up that really shows the history and the science behind the treasure seeking. I loved this quote describing his first find (from his website) "I picked up the small, blackened disc from the sand and gently rubbed at its surface. There looking back at me was the image of King George III of England. I had found my first treasure - the stuff dreams are made of! To actually hold in my hand one of these legendary coins and know that the last person to touch it had died over 195 years ago, on a stormy night on September 1, 1785, was an extraordinary feeling. This was truly a gift from the sea."

We also got some new shells for our museum while we were there (the museum is on the top floor of Sea Shell City), as well as a nice big (dried) porcupine fish.

We did a few other nice things: we visited a Japanese steak house.

And we built (and demolished) a gingerbread house!

Mostly we relaxed. We spent a lot of time comfortably doing nothing in particular. We enjoyed our Grammy and each other.

It was the perfect vacation!