Alligator Bites for Lunch, and Pelicans on Posts

On the way to our hotel outside Charleston, South Carolina, we stopped to eat, and saw brown pelicans. This is a picture of one of them on a post near us. Pelicans have very large stretchy beaks, and they hold lots of fish in their beaks until they swallow them.

I had real alligator bites for lunch. They were fried. They tasted okay, but were very chewy. I also had a stuffed deviled crab. It was very good. I would rather eat alligator bites than have an alligator bite me!

Ferry Boats and More Wild Ponies

We took a small ferry to an island in North Carolina's Outer Banks called Ocracoke. This is a picture of the tower where the captain steers from. It  is very skinny so there is a lot of room for cars on both sides of it. Ocracoke is the island where Blackbeard the pirate was killed.

There were wild ponies on this island as well. The ponies in this picture are in pens. These ponies are directly related to wild mustangs in Spain. They have certain features that only the wild mustangs and these horses have. That is because their ancestors were some of the ones that came over on the Spanish Galleons in the 1500s.

Later we looked out at the surf washing up on the beach, and we saw porpoises surfing and playing in the waves. They were very cute!

Then we took a very large ferry boat from Ocracoke Island to Cedar Island, also in North Carolina. A lot of seagulls chased the boat because they wanted people to feed them, so I fed them bread.

Bridge Tunnel and Monster Truck

Today we went across a really really long bridge over Chesapeake Bay.

Then, all of a sudden it became a tunnel under the bay.

Then it became a bridge again, then a tunnel again, and then a bridge again! It was so big there was even a gift shop, restaurant and fishing pier on the bridge!

The reason the bridge had two tunnels was so that huge boats would be able to sail over the tunnels. Some of the boats are too big to sail under the bridge, so they have to sail over the tunnels.

Then we had to stop here

To buy a very special boy a present! The store was open this time. Just as we were driving out of the parking lot, the trailor truck came back bringing the monster truck home from another show.

When we got to North Carolina, we drove up the beach to see the wild horses here. The horses are really big here, not little like the ponies on Assateague, and they like to bite because they are wild. You aren't supposed to get near them. It was pretty dark when we drove down the beach though, so we didn't see the horses.

We drove the truck on the beach in Virginia too. My truck is beginning to think it is a dune buggy!

So far, we have been finding lots of presents for three very special kids!

Wild Horses on Assateague Island

Way back over 400 years ago there were lots of shipwrecks off the coast. They think that some of the horses swam ashore from shipwrecks on big boats called Spanish Galleons and survived on Assateague Island in Virginia and on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother bought me a book about a horse named Misty, who lived on Assateague Island.

Grampy and I are near Assateague, on an island called Chincoteague, and took pictures of some of the wild horses who are still living here now. They are smaller than the big horses you see, more like ponies.

These are some of the ponies in a pen. We were feeding them. When we come to your house, we will be able to tell you a bed time story about them!