Our first destination was Westminster, MD, not just for the wedding, but to stay there for a month or so. We have many friends there, and it was my first home, so it was the perfect place for me to go after leaving my favorite place in the world and crying my eyes out for a day. The familiar people and places in Maryland totally made me feel better about leaving, so it was great.
There were other little places we went before and after MD just to visit family, like Ohio, Tennessee, and Vermont and they were great, and I'm so glad I got to see so many people I love, but overall they were pretty uneventful and totally unblogworthy. So let's skip to the real adventure, to the first place we went just cause we wanted to. Maine.
We chose New England because it's gorgeous, there's lots of fun stuff to do there, me and my sister have never been, and LABSTAH. My parents said they loved Acadia National Park, so it's where we went first. Driving into Maine, the woods were thick and the air was warm but crisp, not at all like the muggy, humid air in the more southern states we had been in for so long. The Visitor's center said the Sand Bar to Bar Island right off the town of Bar Harbor was a must do (Man that's a lot of 'Bar's), but there was only a short period of time every day to go, because of the tides, so we left our dog and bus in the parking lot, and headed for Bar Harbor on a shuttle.
Before going to the sand Bar, I'd never really thought about the lunar tides, and I didn't know how drastic they were, or could be. But after we walked down the quaint little streets of Bar Harbor, passing by seaside shops, smelling the fresh caught steamed lobster, and hearing the honks of the ships in the bay, we reached the sand bar and I knew just how much power the moon had over the water.
There was a stretch of land that connected the beach to an island. It was maybe a quarter mile long, and a couple hundred feet wide. The "sand" (whoever named it Sand Bar had a very loose definition of sand) was white because of all the sea shells and little pieces of rock. We walked out on to it, our feet a bit wet. It was weird thinking that all of it would be totally submerged within a matter of hours. As we explored the bar, finding little creatures and seashells, I tried to imagine what it was like under water, to look up at the sun through the murk and the seaweed.
The next day, we heard Sand Beach was cool, and the only real sand you could find in Maine, so we went there (something about the way it's shaped makes the rocks crumble more fine than other places, making sand. Despite what my grandpa says about them shipping it up with trucks). When I first got to the beach, the thing that struck me was the light green water that stretched out between two massive cliffs. It reminded me of the keys, or some place tropical where you can see your feet through the crystal water. It was much more rough than the keys, though. The waves crashed against the rocks and made that sound that makes you want to spread out a blanket, put on some sunscreen and forget about everything for a while. So, that's what we did. Then, after a few hours, we packed up our stuff, drove around that darned one way road around the whole island, and went home.
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