tortoisegirl

Yesterday there was a big family thing down in Maryland and I went with my dad and his fiance (both sisters skipped out, grrr). I only knew about five people there even though we're all apparently related, so that was a little awkward. I won a Skip-It from this little contest we did. Ah, family.

The location was very cool though; a park (national park, maybe) right on the Chesapeake Bay, and our picnic area was right by a fishing pier. My dad's cousin was crabbing and fishing all day and ended up bringing home about three dozen crabs. There was a turtle pond too with a snapping turtle that loved the vanilla wafers we fed him. And! The park has a rehabilitation center for birds that are injured, and some of them can't be re-released into the wild. There's a really cool habitat for a handful of raptors right in the middle of the woods. No attendants, just a series of wood-and-wire enclosures.

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There were two Red-Tailed Hawks:
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And two Great Horned Owls:
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One of the owls has an injured eye and one of the hawks has much of one wing missing. The owls kept turning their heads to watch up as we walked around the enclosure. Creepy. It was awesome seeing them up close, in the middle of the quiet woods! It was just the three of us there at the moment so we didn't have to dodge around a crowd of people to see them like you would at a zoo.

After we left the family picnic Marie-Claire had a hankering for some crabs so we explored the area a bit looking out for a restaurant. Which was mostly...driving past cornfields. For like an hour. We did find a restaurant overlooking a marina and Dad and Marie-Claire had their crabs. I've never been to a crab place before so I was kinda 0_0 when they dumped a pile of cooked crabs right on the table. They creeped me out. And I don't eat seafood so I was there with my salad and french fries. Idk, I think seafood will eternally weird me out.

And then this silliness happened after dinner, because we're all dorks sometimes.
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