Monday brought the first glimpse of summer as temperatures reached the low 80's for the first time this year. Knowing what the temperature was going to be ahead of time, I was looking forward to a day spent in the sand reading a book and soaking in the sun. Although there was no swimming allowed since there's no lifeguards on duty until Memorial Day, and the water is still probably too cold to swim in to begin with, it was still a day worthy enough to be spent at the beach.
I packed a lounge chair, sunscreen, a book, and picked up a quesadilla with a water bottle and made my way over to Orchard Beach. Since its not summer season yet, parking was free, and there were a great many deal of cars in the parking lot since it was such a nice day. When I arrived at the beach area I noticed there were about a hundred or so people on the sand already as if it was a normal summer day. A few people were in the water up to their ankles, but no one was fully swimming, except for a few rogues far off at the end of the beach who were out of sight of the one police jeep on patrol. I downed my black bean quesadilla rather quickly and dove into my book shortly thereafter. As I gave my eyes a break every now and then, I recalled an previous experience at this beach months earlier where a encountered an unexpected rocky terrain. It was several months earlier when I was at this beach and I walked over to the very far left end. I was always curious of what lied ahead beyond that part of the beach, so I checked it out one day and discovered large boulders of land that people were sunbathing on and fishing off of.
The sun was beaming down on me and I was without an umbrella at the beach, so between that and needing something to rest my reading eyes with, I decided to head over to those rocks again. With the tied down low, water had exposed more of the rocky beach front, and slippery algae had formed against the large boulders When I saw the green matter, I thought of it nothing more than sea weed, so I stepped on it. As soon as my foot made contact, I almost fell down immediately. I wanted to keep going, but these rocks were proving to be slipperier than ice. What I needed was time to regroup, so instead of worrying about how slippery the rocks were, I took a minute to focus on a pair of ducks which happened to be swimming by at the time. Then when I was ready, I slowly maneuvered from one small rock to the next, to the next, to the next, until I was able to get up onto one of the higher boulders which was way above water level and without slippery algae. Once I reached that peak I saw that there were about a dozen other people around; some were fishing, some where taking pictures, and some were even sunbathing like I had seen months earlier there.
After getting to the high-point of the rocks, the rest of the walking is far easier, but one still must be careful not to fall down and possibly face a serious injury. I walked along the rocks until I was brought to a small hiking trail which lies in the Orchard Beach area as well. I took up on the trail, not knowing what I would encounter, and for the most part everything seemed like the typical wooded trail one would expect. The only difference with the trail is that every now and then some weird guy would pop out of nowhere and look at you as if you didn't belong there. As I was walking on the trail I was able to see the beachfront area again up ahead, so instead of continuing and possibly bump into some sinister group burying a body or something, I went for a trail lane that exited back to the beach. It was nice to see that nobody stole my book or my lounge chair when I returned to the area I set up on the sand, and I went on to do a little more reading. In total I was there for probably about three before I made my way back home.
Although I was happy I didn't fall off any of the algae covered rocks, I was even more happier to escape the hiking trail of weirdos.......
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