Ah, a blog post in which I will direct you to Google images over my own. I've been to this beautiful coastal town twice, and yet due to poor weather I have a grand total of one picture from it and it doesn't exactly do York Beach justice.
July 2007: As an indication of the compactness of New England, my traveling group (my Aunt Kathy, 10 year old cousin Malia, and my best friend Dan) and I went from New Hampshire, spent the late morning/early afternoon in Salem, Massachusetts, the late afternoon/early evening in Maine, and were still back to my aunt's house in New Hampshire before it was tremendously late.
While the weather in Salem had been about as perfect as they come, the same cannot be said for York Beach. It was gray, with low cloud coverage, and rather drizzly. However, never one to let pesky things like that deter us, we parked at Short Sand Beach's parking lot and went down to the rocky beach below. While my aunt sat with all of our stuff, the three of us kids (well, "kids" - Dan and I were 18) ran to the beach. The water was cold, but not nearly as cold as I had expected it to be based on the air and what I had heard of New England beaches. We stayed in the water quite a long time actually, and only surfaced because we began to feel bad about how bored Kathy must have been.
Near the beach was the ever-present New England coastal arcade where we were all able to buy an ever-healthy slice of pizza for dinner. As we packed the car, we noticed that fog was rolling in. By the time we hit the road, it was nearly impossible to drive. I have rarely seen fog so thick in my life. As passengers, it was cool to see, though Kathy was driving a bit white-knuckled.
March 2010: My "luck" with poor weather in York Beach continued a few years later, when my mother and I returned to the town during a Nor'easter. We only had a few hours to spend in Maine and had hoped that we would be able to go hiking or stroll a beach. Alas. the weather gods had different plans for us. We parked in the same parking lot Kathy, Malia, Dan, and I had a few years earlier. However, unlike 2007, we did not get out of the car. Instead, we watched the waves batter the shore while low-clouds covered the adorable houses that hugged the coast. We even napped a bit, the wind and rain acting as a bit of a lullaby.
Someday, oh someday, I will get to experience Maine (and more of it!) without the fog I have come to associate with it.