The weather this week in New Hampshire has been absolutely amazing. None of us have been able to get enough of being outside (though those dreaded May flies have arrived, so that isn't so pleasant).
Knowing that the weather this entire week was going to be wonderful, we had a look at the tide charts for Rye, NH, to schedule a visit during low tide to Odiore Point State Park. The girls have never been "tide-pooling" (is that a verb, even?). I have never been tide-pooling either! And this will be the first time we've been to the beach since moving to New Hampshire.
Well, we couldn't tide-pool until we could figure out how to read the tide charts. We called the park only to be told that low tide was at an entirely different time than we had read on one of the online charts. We went back online and looked around to discover several different times. After we had finally found three places that gave approximately the same time, we figured we go with it and set our travels to arrive at the park yesterday around 9:30ish... The tide would still be going out for another half an hour and we'd then have a bit of time before it came in.
We arrived closer to 10am but still had time before official low-tide. We had heard that we should visit the drowned or sunken forest... and that is where we ended up for the tide-pooling part of our adventure (and ended up seeing some of the petrified wood, though the photos I took of them were uninspiring):
After tide-pooling, we figured it would be nice (particularly for our littlest one who isn't stable enough to navigate the rocks on her own) to run around on a bit of sandy beach, so we headed South just a bit to Wallis Sands State Park - a very small, but perfectly manageable sandy beach with a HUGE expanse of sand because it was low tide. This place would have been packed if it was the weekend. One of the biggest positives of homeschooling is that you can make excursions and field-trips like this during "off" times, when the crowds will be far less.
My dear hubby had insisted on packing every type of shoe available to us. At the time, I thought it was silly and that I'd do just fine with my Keen sandals, but boy am I glad to have had my waterproof boots to keep my toes warm and dry! You have more good ideas than I give you credit for, Dear Rabbit!
