The next morning, I woke up and saw a weird orange light strip on the wall. I jumped out of bed and saw the sun about halfway up over the Atlantic Ocean. I got excited and yelled for Jaren to come see. haha. He thought I was a little mean for waking him up, but as soon as he saw it he was a little happier. :) We snapped a few pictures and then crawled back in bed for a while. After breakfast we drove down a ways to the Ocean City boardwalk. You can tell that in the summer it must be just crawling with people. We got there early enough that none of the little shops were open. It was almost creepy to see everything looking so deserted. There were a bunch of carnival rides that were also closed down for the winter and deserted looking. We walked out onto the beach and touched the water so we could say that we have touched the Atlantic ocean. Then we spent a couple of hours taking tons of pictures of the pier and the beach. It was pretty windy and cold, but not too bad at this point. A little later on, we walked down to the rocky point at the end of the beach and there the wind was howling and bitter cold. Our faces were both numb after a few minutes of picture taking so we started walking back towards the boardwalk and the car.
By this time, some of the shops and restaurants had opened up. We stopped in a few of the shops but didn't see anything we had to have. The smell of french fries in the air won us over though. We stopped into a little burger place. I got some cheese fries and Jaren got some chili cheese fries. They were EXCELLENT. :) By this time, our camera battery was running a little low so we headed back to the hotel to grab the extra battery. Then we headed out in search of a lighthouse. Jaren had seen one online that was supposedly pretty close to our hotel. ....About 30 miles up the road we had come to a State/national park (not sure which) and decided we would check it out. As we were driving through, we saw another huge concrete tower that we had seen all over the place and decided to check this one out cause it was close. Apparently it was a World War II lookout tower that was erected to protect the waterway between Delaware and New Jersey. It had a long spiral staircase inside and you could walk all the way up to the top of the tower and look out over the park, the ocean and the bay. It was gorgeous but SOOO windy and cold. From the top of this tower, you could see that there were two lighthouses a little ways off. So we went to find them.
We drove a little ways further and had to hike over a bit of sand to get closer to the lighthouse we had seen. It was a pretty little red brick one. The wind was so cold and strong at this place that it was blowing sand in our faces and we felt like we were going to get blown over. Jaren gave me his beanie cause my head and ears were cold, but after that I was actually pretty warm. We went looking for crabs but decided that they were all hibernating or something. We did find some HUGE crab shells on the beach here though. I wouldn't want one of those coming after me!
After the lighthouse adventure we headed back towards our hotel. We had someone look up the lighthouse that was supposedly by our hotel and discovered that it was, actually only like 2 blocks away from our hotel. It was just on the opposite side we thought it would be on. It was really random and wasn't even close to the water. We were both glad we had found the other lighthouse further up the road.
That night we spent swimming, going out to eat, and going to a movie. We slept in the next morning and just relaxed until it was time to check out and head home. We had fun talking and taking in the scenery on the way home. It was a fun trip. :)
