Chincoteague Island and Assateague National Seashore

Kent had a Friday off from work on October 14th, so I picked him up from work in the afternoon of the 13th and we drove to the island of Chincoteague. It's in Virginia, but we had to drive through a good chunk of Maryland to get there. It was about a four-hour drive from DC.

Chincoteague is on the eastern shore of Virginia and was made famous from the book, Misty of Chincoteague, published in the 1940's about one of the wild ponies from the island.

We stayed in a suite at the Fairfield Inn at Chincoteague, and this was the view out the window of our room.

It was a lovely autumn day, and we were right on the water.

Below is a picture of the ice cream parlor in Chincoteague that is renowned for having the best ice cream in Virginia. We went there both nights we were in town to see if it was really worthy of the title! It was very good, but I think there's a place about a half an hour from our house in Stafford that's just as good.

We spent most of our time at the Wildlife refuge and national seashore run by the National Park Service. It's always fun to see places named after our daughter-in-law.

This wall told the history of the wild ponies that live on the island. No one really knows where they came from, but they've lived on the island for hundreds of years.

This was the only glimpse we caught of the wild ponies.

 There are two different large herds of the ponies, but they were doing a good job of staying out of sight while we were there.

The beach was very nice, but it was too chilly to get in the water. This beach is actually on the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the shoreline near us is on the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the first sights we saw as we got out of the car at the wildlife refuge was a large bald eagle flying overhead. That's the first one I've seen in Virginia.

We got a good view of other large birds, too.

I don't know what kinds of birds these were, but there were lots of them.

There was a light house on the wildlife refuge. We hoped we'd be able to catch another glimpse of the wild ponies if we climbed to the top, but we didn't. There was a nice view of the beach and surrounding area, though.

Our last stop on our trip was to the NASA Wallops flight facility.

 They'd just launched a rocket from this site five days previous from our visit with supplies going to the international space station. Apparently the launch was visible all over Virginia, but I was in California getting ready to board a plane when the rocket was launced.

The visitor's center wasn't very large but it was interesting to read about the different types of rockets launched and what their purposes were.

We had an enjoyable and relaxing trip and are very glad we went!