A Short Trip to Martha's Vineyard

Hola! I'm back from my trip within a trip and I have lots of fun pictures to show you. First though, a couple of "housekeeping" things- haha, I feel like such a teacher when I say that.

#1- One of my friends started a blog a few weeks ago and I just KEEP forgetting to tell you about it. Tiff and I have been friends since seventh grade, and we are now both teachers (she is a preschool special education teacher). She is blogging about her super healthy lifestyle, and some traveling... so, go check it out: Sun Run Fun.

#2- For any Boston readers out there, LUNA Chix is having a Walk/Run for Fun on Thursday September 8th at 6:30pm. It begins at Cambridge Common in Harvard Square. From there, everyone will split into groups of 10-20 women to either do a 2.7 mile run or a 1.5 mile walk. It costs $25 and your registration goes to The Breast Cancer Fund, and pays for your swag bag (including a tech t shirt), music, food etc :) There is even going to be a yoga-inspired cool down at the end. There is a very good chance I may do this if I can drag myself off my couch (it's the first day of school, so I might be dead haha). If you want more information or to register go to Team LUNA Chix Walk or Run For Fun.

So anyway, Martha's Vineyard. Since Amber has taught me so much about Canadian geography, it's time for all of you to learn a bit about Massachusetts geography.

So this week, I've been on vacation in Cape Cod. On Sunday, we took a drive up to Chatham (currently known for a high population of Great White Sharks) to see the Chatham Lighthouse. Chatham is all the way east on the map above, right before the Cape goes upward :)

The beach across the street was pretty awesome as well...

I then took Eric down some questionable roads to a place called Monomoy Wildlife Refuge. Fortunately, I've taken Eric enough random places that he knows to trust me even if we end up at a few dead ends at first. Luckily we found it because it was a huge stretch of beautiful shoreline with very few people on it.

On Monday, Eric and I took a ferry over to Martha's Vineyard which is one of the islands off the coast of the Cape If you are from the US, Martha's Vineyard may be familiar to you as a lot of celebrities have summer houses at the Vineyard and President Obama visits the Vineyard every summer and is there right now, in fact!

I learned while I was on the island one of the reasons why celebrities enjoy visiting this island (aside from the overall beauty). Apparently, the "cool thing" to do in the vineyard if you see a celebrity is to just say hi and then go back to minding your own business. It's considered not okay to bother them in any way. I am actually impressed a system like this works so well considering all the visitors who may not know this, but perhaps people are just too busy enjoying their own vacation to bother with a random movie star, who knows?

The ferry ride over is definitely part of the fun of getting to the islands, and when we arrived in Oak Bluffs I was already happy about sitting outside with the wind in my hair for the past hour. I was made a lot more happy by the delicious lobster pasta I ordered at lunch (Giordano's Restaurant).

After lunch, Eric and I did a bus tour of the whole island. I still haven't decided if I would recommend this tour to others. The tour guide was good and knew a lot about the island, plus it was a good way to see Aquinnah Cliffs without a car. However, it was hard to see most other attractions from the road, so I think if I was going to do it again I'd probably fork over more money to rent a car for the day. The cliffs were pretty worth it though...

On Monday night we ate some Mexican food at Sharky's and then we stayed at one of my friend's from work's house. Her parents have a beautiful house not far from Oak Bluffs and it was fun to catch up with her since I haven't seen her since school ended. We also greatly appreciated having a clean place to stay since hotels aren't really the best on Martha's Vineyard and yet still seem to cost an arm and a leg! Tuesday morning we woke up and caught the bus to Vineyard Haven for a kayak tour. Eric's mom bought us this tour for our anniversary, and it was really, really cool. We got to kayak for a few hours around a lagoon. It was beautiful weather and flat calm water. I do have pictures but they are on my other camera and the guide's waterproof camera so you'll have to wait for those.

After the kayak tour, we headed back to Oak Bluffs to relax for awhile before our ferry would take us back to the Cape :)

Overall, I really like Martha's Vineyard. I probably would never spend a ton of time there seeing as it's very, very expensive and seems silly to ever get a place when I have a free one at the Cape. However, I would like to visit in the winter sometime to see what it's like without as many tourists.

Have you ever been on a ferry to get some where? Do you think that is part of the fun of the trip? Have you ever been to Martha's Vineyard?