Four days ago, my family left the Viking village and headed to a beach for FOSSIL HUNTING! We pulled up to the nice sandy beach…and walked in the opposite direction. After 5 minutes and some not-very-nice views, and smells, of small rivers we came to a stretch of rocks. The rocks were small and about the size of your hand, but only went ½ of the way down the beach. The last half was a small gap less than 2 feet across between seaweed and a rock face. My sister and mom started sifting through the stones, but my dad and I were in a hunting mood. We squeezed in to the narrow path. As I scanned the mixture of clay and rock for fossils, my dad walked ahead. After 10 minutes he came upon a small rock with grooves, lodged between a purple rock and the cliff. He showed it to me and kept going. Now, the reason we were looking here and not on the frequent fossil part of the cliff, was because many years ago the sea had overtaken the land beneath it making that part of the cliff inaccessible. The grooves were part of a fossil from an old piece of coral or maybe a trilobyte. It was too tight to move though. I started to look for another one, when I heard a shriek that sounded like someone had dropped a 1 million dollar bill in a paper shredder by mistake. I rushed back and found my dad complaining and yelling loudly, for in his infinite wisdom, he had attempted to cross a small gap of water by jumping on to the seaweed. It turned out to be the plant version of sewage. This material was the color of rust and about as substantial as Jell-O. My dad had muck in both of his shoes, and he SMELLED!!! The dead seagull 5 meters away didn’t help either. By this time we were both quite frustrated as the girls had been yelling, “I found one, I found one!”, for 10 minutes straight. My dad still had to get back though and told me to tell mom, if he went under, he loved her. Then he told me he needed me there because I had to see the spot where his head went under. He braced himself, leaped……and missed. My dad landed in the mud with a massive SHLOP. He waded on to the other side and at the last moment before he reached me loudly proclaimed **** !!! “What”? I asked. Then I saw his feet. I burst out laughing, for he had lost one of his shoes in the mud! He started back in and promptly sank to ½ an inch below his knees. He eventually found it all the way on the other bank, but by this time I was laughing so hard that I had tears coming out of my eyes and my ribs ached. We stuck to the rocky beach after that. Half an hour after the “incident”, we went to the nice part of the beach and washed off our feet and shoes. When we got in the car we were tired and smelly, but we were feeling quite satisfied at the fossils we had found. When we arrived at the house we bundled up our fossils and relaxed before going to bed. Tomorrow we would be getting up early and exploring a young cave that was about 10,000 years old. P.S. When we got to the cave we saw some more fossils and some exhibits that showed what the coral looked like 400 million years ago.