Earth Day on Fire Island
The best way to celebrate Earth day is by being outside, and even though it was a gloomy rainy day, that’s exactly what we did! Spending our weekend’s outdoors isn’t uncommon to begin with but for Earth Day we decided to take a drive to Fire Island to visit the lighthouse and pick up any trash we saw along the beach. We love visiting this place because the path that leads you to the lighthouse is a lovely boardwalk through the dunes and on your way you almost always get to see deer, red foxes and tons of pretty birds.
Once you arrive to the lighthouse there is a cute gift shop and a museum that is filled with tons of interesting history about the construction of the lighthouse, the property and Long Island itself. The actual museum was once the home of the original lighthouse keeper’s, which we thought was pretty cool. Some fun facts we learned from the museum was that the Fire Island lighthouse was first lit in November of 1858 and was originally painted a cream color. I personally found that very interesting because it is so well known for it’s current black and white paint and I can’t really picture it looking any other way. Apparently it was painted with the black and white bands in August 1891. You are able to climb the 182 steps to the top of the lighthouse but we decided not to on this particular day since it was cloudy and we wanted to get down to the beach for a walk.
In honor of Earth Day we decided to take a bag with us on our walk along the beach to pick up any trash we discovered along the way. Although it felt really good to pick up the garbage, we were actually pretty unsettled at the amount we found. About 20 minutes into our walk we had pretty much an entire bag filled. It is sad and scary to think that there are many people out there who take this planet for granted but we were glad to be able to make a small difference. Every little bit counts and we look forward to doing more of this in the future.
“The earth is what we all have in common.”