Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken

Our mini-vacation took us from Frederick, MD to Ocean City, MD with a special stop on Assateague Island, home to wild horses.  We crossed a lot of cool bridges on our drive.

The 1947 newberry honor book, Misty of Chincoteague, is based on these wild horses and the kids and I recently read it aloud together (thanks, Aunt Louise!).  It was so fun to get to see them in person. 
The book's actually about the horses that live on the VA side of Assateague - there's a fence dividing the two herds.  The MD side (in green) prides itself on being hands-off with the horses, but the VA side (in red) does a big round up once a year and swims all the horses and their foals across the bay.  They auction off the foals to help with population control (and continue tradition) and then swim them back across to their sanctuary.  We hear it's a huge event and people come from all over to see it.

These horses are wild in the same sense that the elk at Yellowstone are wild. They don't have owners, but they obviously are used to having people around, as one searched our kid-less stroller for food and then tried to get into our van.

Henry sums it up well at the end of this video.  We had an awesome vacation! (minus the Eliza part mentioned in the previous post)