Yep, a beach named “Sand”, on the French side of Saint Martin. Since I’m starting my new blog off freshly back from a trip to the Caribbean (my favorite place to go), I thought I would start with some pictures from the trip.
While in Saint Martin, we took one day to rent a car and drive around the island. This is a must-do for anyone interested in “seeing what they can find”. More on that in another blog. For now, I’ll focus on one place we found, “Le Sand Beach”, on the French side.
If you want to find it on a map, you just have to Google “Dreams Beach Bar Saint Martin”. It’s on the east end peninsula, north of the airport. We just happened to turn down the right road to check out the beach, and we ended up finding one of the calmest and most serene scenes I’ve ever beheld. We may have been extra lucky, visiting in the off season (July), but there was hardly anyone on the beach. There was a restaurant, beach chairs, a place to get a massage, and the requisite notification of the “Naturalist Corner”. (Well, it was the French side, after all.)
What took my breath away, however, was the wooden dock, jutting 30 feet out from the soft white sand. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped my feet from their involuntary walk out onto that dock, overlooking the perfect blue/green water. I was under the spell of the Caribbean. Andrea and I just sat down, and “were”. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we just stared. Yes, I took a few pictures. But the best part was just absorbing the clean, pure, picturesque beauty. It infected our senses.
After our hour had passed, we walked around the beach for a few minutes, but we really didn’t need anything more there. There are hundreds of places on the island we could get a drink. We weren’t there for a drink or to get a massage. We had accidentally stumbled onto a unique experience that was just being in the right place at the right time.
Now that I’m back in the real world (sitting in a cubicle, driving my kids around, edging the lawn, all of those “necessary” things), I find my mind going back to Le Sand Beach. And that dock. A simple wooden doc, on a beach with a simple name. It’s often in the simplest of things that we can find our relaxation, our pleasure, or our escape. That hour was one of the most amazing (and calming) moments of my life. I hope you get the chance to find it, too.
Click on any picture to view them in a slide show.
