Day 246

Today we started a weekend vacation on Chincoteague Island in Virginia. It's on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. By a bird's eye view, it's only about an hour away. However, unless you have a helicopter or small plane, you aren't getting there that way. From Richmond, it's about 4 hours away. We had to travel down the coast to Virginia Beach (about 1.5 hrs) and up the island coast to Chincoteague, which is at the very end of the island section of the coast (about 2.5 hrs). Chincoteague has uninhabited beaches. What does this mean? It means that there are no hotels lining their beaches, unlike Virginia Beach. This is mostly due to it being wetlands/marshes which makes the land not suitable for building. This means that the public area is part of a nature preserve and you can't access all of it, but you can access a large portion, which is good enough for us. There is another reason why we chose Chincoteague for our destination. I'll save that surprise for tomorrow.

Marsh land on the way to the island. Marsh is on either side of the road for miles before we get to the bridge for the island.

There were red and orange flowers along the front of the hotel.

Panoramic of the waterway behind the hotel. There was a little balcony for our room, which had this beautiful view.

This is the sun glistening on the water by the bridge.

After dinner, we went to the beach to walk around.

This is a different variety of seagull than we normally see in Virginia Beach.

Birdy foot print

Waves

Sorry that the horizon isn't straight, but this is a good view of the waves crashing. I took a few sets, but this is my favorite.

The other side of the beach area is marsh. There are many kinds of wild life on the nature preserve. Birds are the most common. 

Crane

By the time we got back to the hotel, the sun was setting. We walked along the back boardwalk and watched it set. We also watched what a local called "The Parade of Ducks" and Alex calls "Duck School". It was a large group of ducks. There were two adults guiding the young ones off the board walk and into the water. Then, guiding the group around this isle of land into the main water.