We had to wake up early to get to the ferry on time. I’m not a fan of getting up early… Especially when I didn’t get a ton of sleep. J wasn’t feeling to great and we were up most of the night. J decided to stay at the campground, while the rest of us went to Cumberland. He was nice enough to give us a ride over to the ferry.

We made it to the Cumberland Island Visitor Center and checked it. We had a little time to spare, so we looked around a bit. Before you load onto the ferry, they give you a little talk.  Up until this moment, I have been nothing but excited about the trip. Then the guide started…

She put up a map with the lower part of the island. It showed the two drop off docks for the ferry, the Dungeness Ruins, and the Sea Camp Beach. She explained a  round trip route to get to all four with in the time limits for the earliest ferry. That is the part that terrified me. It will something like this (I said LIKE this…its not word for word..)

In order to make the round trip get off the dock at the first stop. From there, you will walk to the main road, turn right and head straight to Dungeness Ruins. Once you leave there continue towards the beach. Now you will have to wade through a little standing water. It’s about waist deep…

A little bit of water….waist deep…. Honey I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from we call that swimming… And considering that I’m carrying all our drinks for the day, A is carrying all her camera equipment, and M is carrying all our food and whatever else we need for the day, I’m not “wading” through anything- I’ll take the long route… I’m pretty sure she was making a joke. But I stand by my statement.

The weather for the day wasn’t looking so good. My iphone weather app showed that it was going to storm later in the day, and it had already rained just a little. Actually, it rained a little more on the ferry ride over to the island. It looked like it was going to be cloudy for the rest of the day, which was fine with me… cloudy means that it wouldn’t be really hot!

We did get off at the Dungeness Ruins dock (as did most of the ferry), and were greeted by HORSES!!! Tons of them… everywhere. And though this was a pretty site, later in that same speech I told you about, they told us that we could NOT ride the horses… If I can’t ride them I’m going to move on… and we were on a mission to see as much as we could see in one day!

We left most of the ferry group at the dock, and headed towards Dungeness Ruins. Our walk was only about half of a mile, and we had a lot going on. For starters, I gave M the job of using the GoPro Hero. The problem was that I forgot to bring the stabilizer. So even though M got a lot of great video throughout the day…it would make you sick watching it (I’ll still put a link if you feel like you can handle it…). Another thing was something I think I have said before… No one wants to see the back of my head in all of A’s pictures- and now M’s video… So I had to remember to stay behind them. Which is not so easy for me for a few reasons…

1. I like to be first… I need to be first…
2. I was really excited to see everything…
3. I really like to explore and I don’t want my view to be blocked by M and A…
4. M never told us when she was going to use the GoPro…

We also had another group of ladies join us on our walk. They were really nice but didn’t seem to understand that I needed to be first… and to stay behind the cameras…. It was nice to have them around so that we could get a group picture in front of the ruins.

The Dungeness Ruins were amazing. The only problem was the fact that they wouldn’t let me explore the inside. Before you get mad at me, I realize that if everyone climbed all over them they wouldn’t last long. That, and they are really unsafe and a liability for the park. But, I still wish that we could have gotten closer. I mean I’m special right? A takes amazing pictures right?Just think how great they would be if she got closer.

The steps leading up the the actual house were blocked with a sign that said “area closed no entry.” All the gates around the building were locked. Normally, things like this wouldn’t stop us. But considering we had just gotten caught breaking the rules the night before, and that a million people were around, we decided that we best follow the rules. I did wonder what was the worse that could happen, and I figured that getting caught and missing the rest of the island was a pretty good reason for us to follow the rules.

 

About this time it started to rain again. Thankfully, it wasn’t raining really hard and we were prepaired with rain jackets. Well, M and I were prepaired with rain jackets… A was prepaired with a poncho from J’s parents camper, but it worked! A little rain wasn’t going to stop us from exloring the rest of the day, so we set out towards the beach. Not to wade in the water… we aren’t that crazy. There were other things we wanted to see that way! But that will have to wait for next week!

-B

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