An adventurous sunday in Fire Island

Fire Island is a narrow islet just south of Long Island, about an hour an a half driving from Manhattan, which means not that far from civilization. The title of this post may sound ridiculous, but, read on... At least that was an adventure for me.

We had wanted to go hiking to this place for a long time. Every time something had been wrong: weather, fatigue, booked up etc...
Yesterday was the perfect time to go: excellent weather (and not too hot) and a bit of free time. Plus Elise is going back to France for 2 months soon so it's time to go now.

We had a nice long hike along the beach... at least until the half way point. We hiked on this virgin beach, trying to find the most compact sand and avoid the waves.
It was really like a nature walk: we stumbled upon hundreds of horseshoe crabs (limule in French), a creature almost unknown to our European eyes; and even discovered a small shark and a few skate fish (raie in French). It was a very pleasant feeling to see wilderness there, protected by the status of National Seashore. I'm beginning to appreciate more and more the system of US National Parks, national recreation areas and seashores, where you often have to pay a fee to visit, hike or camp but the fee is really useful to pay rangers and protect nature.

After the half way (7 miles), according to our hiking guide, we just needed to cross the dunes, using the boardwalk and take a track on the other side of the island. The island is only about 200m wide as you can see on the satellite view. What the book didn't tell is that the path was very very faint, overgrown by vegetation and the preferred habitat for hordes of mosquitoes and ticks.



I got bitten pretty hard, as every time I am in mosquito territory, and, for the first time I was even bitten by a tick. I had 5 in my t-shirt and we even found some in the rental car and back in NYC in the apartment. Neither Elise nor I had ever been bitten, so I was not sure how to remove it. I even had to call Richard for instructions. Of course he made fun of me and said it's easy to remove. That gave confidence to Elise, who easily used her best technique (ahhh, years of scalpel handling in a lab...) to remove the beast and save me from the EVIL lyme disease :-)

Ahhh, I am so happy with my girlfriend :-)

By the way, she designed the new banner on this blog. Isn't it great?

Anyway, the hike made us pretty tired (14 miles on not so hard sand), left us insect bitten and... sun burnt as I forgot the sun block. To me that's an adventure ;-)