Marsh Walking on the Cape

We hadn't really planned on taking a vacation this year; however, my sister convinced us to go. Her condition for going to Cape Cod was that we go so in an effort to see her, we went. While there, my mom, Chris, Andrew, Lucy, and I went to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History.

Its initial appeal was the mini-aquarium, ospreys, bird-watching, and carved birds for about eight dollars a person (kids under three, free!). Andrew enjoyed all of those, especially the two cases of preserved birds. His excitement was infectious as he ran up and down the one hallway with a huge variety of gulls, owls, songbirds, and more. Andrew also really liked seeing turtles for the first time.

I hadn't been intending to hike because it was 90 degrees or so outside, so I had worn my flip-flops. We ended up hiking anyway because Andrew was tired of being inside the nicely air-conditioned museum. They had a few trails but I vetoed the first one we found because it had a really narrow path that supposedly went around the marsh. The second trail we found took us across the marsh and then had a loop around or few options to go down to the beach. We did a bit of bird-watching as we wandered down the sandy path, looped around through a more trail-like path, and then came back to the marsh. While we were out, the tide had started coming in. I remembered seeing something about high tide being around 1 or so, but I hadn't looked carefully at the time. I also didn't think we'd be hiking and then once hiking, out that long. Apparently we were because at 1:07, we headed back across the marsh. We all took our shoes off and carried them back across the boards. Half of the walkway was hot, and the other half had up to ankle-deep water over them.

We made it back across without difficulty (except maybe Chris with a squirmy Andrew) and after going back inside for a little more time at the museum, I checked the board. High tide? 1:10pm. Had we realized this piece of information, we might not have headed across the marsh in the first place. Granted, it did make an interesting mini-adventure.