As we had visited most of the DC museums last year, we decided to take a day trip to a place my wife has been interested in visiting for a while, Calvert Cliffs State Park in Maryland. Surprisingly, it’s only about an hour and 20 minutes from DC.

We left around 8:00am from the Park Hyatt with our younger daughter and her boyfriend and it was a fairly easy drive out of DC and down to the park which is on Chesapeake Bay. When you reach the park, it’s $7 to enter and there was plenty of parking when we arrived before 9:30am.

In order to reach the beach, there is a 1.8 mile hike through a forest. There are also other trails in the park. On the way to the beach, there were some nice views.

The reason to visit this beach is not for the beach itself, which is narrow and full of shells. The star of the show here is the fossils. For some reason, this beach receives a ton of shark’s teeth, bones and other fossils that wash up on the shore. These fossils date back millions of years. My wife had a blast searching through the sand and the water for fossils and found a ton of them. Frankly, I should have just prepared for a longer hike on some of the other trails to pass the time as I got a bit bored. She had a blast though.

Around 12:30pm, we hiked our way back through the forest to the parking lot. It was much hotter by then, but thankfully the summer storms had held off for us. On the way back to DC, we stopped at Chick-Fil-A for some much needed refreshment. It took a bit longer to get back to the Park Hyatt, but we were back in plenty of time to relax and shower before our evening plans. My older daughter decided to sleep in and visit some museums in DC instead of joining us.

Up Next: DC Restaurant Roundup – 2023 Edition

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