Ahhhhh.....

We spent all day Saturday down at Pemaquid Beach, scoring a sunshiney day with warm ocean breezes. Daddy Shortbread got to do one of his favorite activities, poking around in tide pools looking for critters. He hunkers down silently and waits patiently, watching for movement. This method would probably pay off more often if the girls weren't tromping through the same tide pool with all the subtlety of bison.

Still, he turned up this little dude, a hermit crab that Bear professed her instant love for and named "Fred". She even managed to rustle up a companion hermit crab ("Shirley"). Fred and Shirley lived in her sand bucket for the rest of the day until I heartlessly made her leave them at the water's edge.
Bug was CONVINCED that we would be able to locate the exact same sea worm that we found on her field trip to Pemaquid. She wanted to show him to Bear. "I think he was right around here, right Mom? Or was it more over there? Why can't you remember?" No amount of lecturing her about tides and the transient nature of sea worms could convince her that we wouldn't find him. (We didn't).
Daddy Shortbread bought Bug an ice-cream cone at the concession stand, which she promptly dropped in the sand. This seagull was flummoxed as to how to fly off with a scoop of ice-cream. See the white speck falling from his beak? Mint chocolate chip. He'd scoop it up efficiently, fly about two feet before it started to melt and fall apart, then land and try to gather it back together. There was ice-cream all over the beach, thanks to us, and it had the unfortunate coincidence of looking exactly like another substance that commonly falls from seagulls.


After about four hours of lazing on the beach and strolling around looking for sea glass, we packed up and headed to Fort William Henry, also on the Pemaquid Penninsula. It was an interestly little fort, with a modest museum display of artifacts dug up on the site (phleem holder, anyone?). Once we climbed to the top of the tower, we hung out for awhile in the golden late afternoon light, watching the boats in the harbor. The water was liberally dotted with colorful lobster traps, and we saw a couple of lobster boats steaming around hauling traps.

After the fort, we checked out the underwhelming Colonial Pemaquid, which amounted to three or four taciturn guys in colonial dress sitting around in tents. Nearby, though, was an eighteenth century graveyard that we explored despite Bear being "creeped out". Reading the old headstones was fascinating.

Once we started to head toward Wiscasset, where we planned to eat dinner, Bug conked out in the backseat. In a stunning tactical maneuver, due in part to Daddy Shortbread's policy of never reading road signs while driving and the other part to my nearsightedness which allowed me to glimpse only part of a sign (the wrong part) as we barreled past, we took a wrong turn and got lost. Waaaay lost. On a meandering country road that seemed implausibly long, given the length of the penninsula we knew we were on. Forty-five minutes and some intense map-consultation later, when Bug awoke and asked sleepily where we were, Daddy Shortbread replied grimly, "We are exactly where we were when you fell asleep." Wisely, she asked no further questions.

After a leisurely dinner overlooking the water in Wiscassett, we made our way home peacefully. Except for the hooligans in the backseat who engaged in a twelve minute argument over whose lollipop wrapper was touching whom. But still, a great day overall.