90ish days of summer

On our second day in the Rehoboth-Dewey-Lewes area of Delaware, Jeff and I visited Cape Henlopen State Park, where I almost destroyed my camera.

Before: I was walking along the (really nice!) beach at Cape Henlopen State Park. With my camera in hand, of course. Photo by Jeff.

After: The waves came up higher than they ever had before, and splashed me up to my waist. And almost soaked my camera and lens! Photo by Jeff.

But now I’m just getting ahead of myself.

Before Jeff and I hit up the beach, we visited one of Fort Miles‘ fire control towers and climbed our way to the observation deck at its top.

It's a long climb to the top of the control tower.

Days before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, construction on the fort was completed. Because the Delaware Bay allows access to Philadelphia and Trenton, control towers were built on both sides of the bay to track movement in the water and triangulate the position of water vessels. The fort never saw action during the war, but did force the surrender of one German U-boat.

Now, one of the towers has visitor access. And we visited it.

Then, we went to the beach, where I was pleasantly surprised to discover a substantially less touristy beach than the ones at Dewey and Rehoboth. And then we went to the fishing pier… where the tide was low, I saw hermit crabs in their natural environment (!!!) and we hunted for shells and avoided jellyfish.

Low tide at the beach and fishing pier at Cape Henlopen State Park.

Suffice it to say that I learned a lot about beach critters. Thanks, Jeff.

As far as blogging summer photos goes, this is almost the end of the catch-up phase. The only other big photo adventures we had after our three-day stay in Delaware were the J Bar W Ranch rodeo and our three-day exploration of New York City. The New York photos will come in a miniseries of blog posts, as we covered a lot of ground and I’m not yet sure how to present them. (Blog all the color photos first and then the black-and-white? Or, blog them in chronological order? It’s a dilemma.)

Yep. So, with the exception of the New York photos, this is it for photos from this summer.