Nubble Point

Summers we used to drive to Maine to go to the ocean. Growing up in Upstate NY you are pretty land locked, so venturing out to Maine was really exciting for us. My dad always loved this one light house, Nubble Point. It's not far from the New Hampshire border and its really beautiful there.

I remember being really young and not realizing there was even a world outside of the neighborhood I lived in until I had to go to school. And then it only expanded a few blocks at a time. Needless to say, we didn't travel much. Once a year though, we made it out somewhere. If it wasn't to Maine, it was to Florida, Atlantic City or somewhere on the east coast. It always seemed that these vacations had some kind of family curse on them. When we went to Disney my brother got an allergic reaction to the sun block he used; and from then forward (forward meaning until we left for college) we were not allowed to use sunblock. His face swelled up like a balloon and he had to wear a daffy duck hat the whole time to cover himself. When we went to Myrtle Beach one year we got the flu and everyone in our hotel called us the Vomiting Vona's. One time we went to Old Orchard Beach and Hurricane Hugo decided to hit the day after we arrived. We had to evacuate to Portland where my cousins lived. I watched a tree sucked from the ground, roots and all that year. Later, when I was in college we went back to Maine, near Nubble Point and it rained every day for seven days. It was so bad the the one day it stopped raining everyone crammed onto the beach in their bathing suits as if it was 80 degrees and sunny. It was still 65 and drizzling.

We didn't take family trips to Europe or Mexico. And despite the fact that we seemed to have a curse on our vacations, we always laughed much more then we cried. We laughed about all of it. We laughted about the vomiting, the rain, and the way more then half of our family photo's involved my mom hiding behind my dad because the weather made her hair frizz or my brother and I frowning pointing out the cuts or bug bites we got. The one place that we never had any problems at was Nubble Point. Maybe that is why we hold it very close to our heart. We would go to the light house and climb on the rocks, take pictures, pick up seashells from the ocean and then gorge ourselves with the finest lobster around.