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Family vacations include just my wife and I now that the "kids" are grown and married, and these days the two of us are happy to plan our trips around fossil sites. A couple of weeks ago we drove down to New Jersey, Maryland and Pennsylvania, stopping at Big Brook, coastal New Jersey, Calvert Cliffs, St. Clair, Beltzville Park region and Carbondale. It was a great trip. We didn't make any startling discoveries, and the scientific community won't have to rethink any evolutionary theories after our expedition, but we enjoyed ourselves immensely. On our drive south we stopped for only an hour at Big Brook. We'd been there several times before and we always look forward to it. We didn't have time to stray too far from the parking area but we did a little sifting with quarter-inch screens and made a few small finds. The mammal tooth is modern, not fossilized. I think it's deer. We found a few small shark teeth, the usual belemnite pieces and concretions of all shapes and sizes. We tend to pick up anything that looks like something, but we weren't there long enough collect very much. Our malibu barely noticed the weight. ................ We drove to the shore and enjoyed a few days just walking the beaches and marshes of Brigantine, New Jersey, not searching for fossils, just enjoying the sea and the migrating birds. I did come across what I think is a bit of fossil coral. I could be wrong. It seemed out of place there but just about anything can wash up on an ocean beach. ..... After a few days of R&R in NJ we drove down to Solomons, Maryland, where we stayed a couple of nights and toured the friendly and informative Calvert Marine Museum. It's small but bigger on the inside, with some excellent displays of fossils. Very kid - friendly and also very professional. We had planned on visiting Flag Ponds the next day but ended up at Matoaka instead. It was a cold and damp and I was glad we didn't book space in one of the old wooden cabins. They reminded me of places I stayed with the Scouts as a kid. It was a blast back then but I'm afraid my aching bones are too old for them now. We met the 95-year-old owner who was helpful and friendly. The young woman in the office was equally friendly, let us use the "facilities" in one of the cabins, and showed us the way to the beach. The strand lines along the narrow beach were full of broken shells, most of them eroded from the cliffs. We collected some miocene scallop shells, along with smaller molluscs and some good-looking barnacles (if you can say that about barnacles), but we didn't see any shark teeth on the surface. We screened along the water line for awhile, and found a few small teeth and quite a few nice pieces of coral. I filled my backpack with chunks of clay that had fallen out of the cliffs, to check for any small shells or micros, someday. The car bounced along the dirt road without any real problems. ... On our way to Pennsylvania the next day, we first stopped at Brownies Beach, a little further north along the Calvert Cliffs. We arrived at a very low tide and the beach was beautiful. We mostly scanned along the shoreline as we walked the beach, and occasionally stopped to sift a little. My wife found one nice shark tooth, maybe Carcharias sp?, but I didn't have much luck just scanning the surface. We were happy just walking along the beach and admiring the cliffs and the scenery, and occasionally stopped to pick up a few fossil shells. I brought back some more clay to look through later. (To be continued ... )