Rehoboth Beach, DE ~ Part 3 ~ Some Day Trips

In my continuing saga of the 2008 Family Beach week at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I have decided to write about a couple of little excursions we went on. The first being Cape Henlopen State Park.

Cape Henlopen State Park is in nearby Lewes, Delaware at the mouth of the Delaware Bay. It was just a short drive away. We drove over by ourselves, my parents met up with us a little later, and my brother Jerry biked over. There is a lot to see and do at Cape Henlopen, it's hard for me to know where to start. I guess I'll start where we did, at a World War II Observation Tower. Several of these towers were built along the coast during WWII to spot enemy ships. We were able to climb up one. There was a great view from the top, you could see out in all directions.

View from the Observation Tower. You can see another tower in the upper right of this picture.

Next we headed over the the Seaside Nature Center. Here there is a bike shed where you can borrow (i.e. FREE) a bike for a couple of hours to explore the park. There are also several fish tank exhibits inside. Lillian was fascinated watching the fish up close. From here we were off to do a little geocaching. This was the first time geocaching for my parents and brother, I think they enjoyed it. We had to walk through the frisbee golf course to find our treasure, so if you like frisbee golf, you could do that here too! Of course you can also go to the beach here as well. There is a beautiful bathhouse but the beach was quite crowded. We just took a look, for we were off to the old Fort Miles (another WWII area) and to climb up the 80 foot dune. This is the highest dune between Cape Hatteras and Cape Cod. There was a paved walkway along the Great Dune area so it was not hard to do with the stroller.

The guys with our geocaching find.

The view of Fort Miles from the Observation Tower.

The view while walking on the Great Dune.

Another little trip we took was to Nassau Valley Vineyards. This is Delaware's first farm winery. A farm winery is where the grapes are grown, wine produced, and wine sold, all at the same location. The winery had a self-guided tour which was not a tour so much as an exhibit, but it was an interesting look at the beginnings of this particular winery as well as some history on wine making. At the end of the exhibit, there was a tasting room and of course we had our tastings and bought a couple of bottles to enjoy later. As you can see from the photos, they have very picturesque grounds.

Next time, I'll give some restaurant reviews. You can read my earlier posts on our Rehoboth Beach trip: Family Fun at the Beach and Letterboxing.

I Found It!

On Saturday, we finally got to do something we had been planning for a long, long time. We went geocaching. And it was so much fun, I feel myself being instantly obsessed with and addicted to it. If you are not familiar with it, geocaching is where you are looking for a cache (small to large size container) which is hidden (usually a wooded area), using the GPS coordinates. Once you find the cache, there is usually a log to sign and there may be little treasures to swap. You don't need a big, fancy GPS device either. We just have a little handheld unit, nothing like the navigation systems that are so popular today. It just needs to give you the coordinates.

We had a lot of errands to run on Saturday, so we thought we would stick something fun in the middle of it to break up the day. We went to North Park and had time to look for two caches. The first brought us by an old fountain. It was so beautiful there, with ferns and mosses everywhere. John found the first hidden cache. It was a micro-cache with just a log, so we signed it and re-hid it. Here are some pictures from the first find.

"I found it!"

Well Hidden

Lots of ferns

The Fountain of Youth

Now we're ready for our next one. We head over to the swimming pool parking area and start looking. We head back on a nice trail, we're at the right coordinates, and after some searching - We found it. This was a much larger container with a log book and all sorts of neat things to swap. So we left a little stretchy frog toy and took a Nemo light toy. After this find we had to continue on our way, but we're already planning our next adventure. Here are some more pictures.

"We found it !"

"What's this doing here ?!"