Beach Week 2022

It’s Sunday morning now, my first full day back at home after a week on vacation, but I wrote a little bit at the beach every day because I write every day no matter where I happen to be. I think I started writing about beach week (I should say Beach Week) maybe in 2017? We skipped a year in 2018 (Montreal) but thanks to COVID we have been to the beach for every vacation since 2019. You can read about 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2021 if you like. Fair warning: None of those posts differ significantly from this one. You’ve seen one week at Avalon, you’ve seen them all. But we keep going back, don’t we? 

*****

It's the first Saturday of August so I must be crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. As a passenger, of course. It's day one of Beach Week 2022 and I just entered New Jersey. We should be in Avalon in an hour. 

I wanted to go somewhere else this year. But I'm happy to be going anywhere, and the Jersey Shore is one of my favorite places. I love driving through the flat New Jersey pine barrens and tomato fields with all of the other bike-laden cars and SUVs carrying vacationers to Ocean County and Atlantic County. We’ll stop to refuel, and we'll sit in our car while an attendant fills up the gas tank because this is New Jersey and that's the law here. I imagine that there are people in New Jersey who don't even know how to fill their own gas tanks. In a little while, we will cross another bridge, this one over the inland bay that separates Avalon Manor on the mainland from Seven Mile Island, home of Avalon and Stone Harbor. 

*****

It's Sunday morning now, and we're here. I'm sitting on an Adirondack chair on our tiny second floor deck, listening to seagulls and letting the salt breeze dry my hair. It's 8:30 AM so the rest of the household is asleep and will remain so until 10:15 or so when I will wake them up to go to Mass. They'll complain about this. I think I'll go full-on Catholic mother and remind them that Jesus died for their salvation so they can sacrifice 45 minutes of their vacation to attend Mass. They’ll love that. Lol. 

Our little beach condo rental is simple but very pleasant and spotlessly clean. There's a bookcase in the bedroom, in a corner next to a window where the sun comes in in the morning. It was nice to wake up to the sight of that sunny little corner. 

Yesterday we unpacked and made the beds and got the lay of the land. We found the coffee maker and the outside shower and the bike rack. My son, of course, dealt with the Wi-Fi. I went to the corner store and handed over $70 for coffee, tea bags, sugar, soap, sunscreen and some peaches and tomatoes. Last night my sons drove to a 24 hour CVS in Cape May Courthouse, and so now in addition to peaches and tomatoes, my little temporary kitchen is stocked with Doritos, Tostitos, Cheezits (but not Cheetos), Haribo Happy Cola gummy candy, and pretzel chips.  We'll go to a proper grocery store later. For now, it's shaping up to be a perfect beach day. 

*****

And it was an almost-perfect beach day. I say almost perfect because it was very windy on the beach, which made it feel downright cold in the water. One block inland and it was August-hot but the beach itself felt like April. My son has already started on our shell collection, and I’ll collect a few more today. The boys won’t be around today; they are driving to Cape May to spend the day with friends whose family has a place there. My sister and her family are here in town, too, as are my neighbors and friends and their three children. There are lots of text messages back and forth regarding when and where everyone’s going to the beach and to dinner. Everyone wants to hang out with us because why wouldn’t they? The more the merrier. 

We did go to Mass, and I’m happy we did although I can always do without Father Whitey O’Maga inserting his trumped-up trumpity trumpster politics into what was an otherwise quite reasonable homily. Father, you should probably know that The Grasshopper and the Ant is a pagan fable written many years before the time of Christ, and that the moral of that story does not accurately reflect His teaching on how we should treat the poor. SMH. SMDH. 

I’m sitting on the deck again and because it is now Monday and not Sunday, it’s pretty noisy. Today is a trash collection day AND there are several new houses under construction on or near the block where we are staying. There are signs around town encouraging voters to “preserve Avalon’s quality of life” by rejecting some ballot measure or other. That reads to me as code for “there are just enough of us around here, and there are far too many of you.” Avalon is a nice place and people want to come here. So make room for them. The more the merrier. 

*****

I often tell people that Avalon is the preppiest town in the United States, and I stand by that statement. Yes I know that it has stiff competition but I believe that it stands alone (well, we’ll include Stone Harbor in there) atop the peak of preppiness. Begin your day by counting blond heads on the beach or on Dune Drive, and I promise you will lose count well before noon. Same promise applies if you’re counting golf carts used as transportation, college or prep school flags flying over multi-million dollar beach houses like they’re Navy ships at sea, and people wearing Vineyard Vines apparel or the like. 

In preppy vacation towns, you will not only find expensive restaurants and stylish boutiques and galleries, you will also find odd little niche enterprises dedicated solely to helping rich people dispose of their excess cash. Only in Avalon or Stone Harbor will you find BOTH a dog bakery (a bakery that caters to dogs, I kid you not) AND a dog ice cream parlor. Only in Avalon or Stone Harbor will you find personal concierge services that will take care of every errand and chore, including setting up your beach tent and chairs in the morning and returning them to you in the evening. 

And then of course there are the beach yoga studios and the juice and acai bowl cafes and the interior design studios that sell $300 custom versions of the “Relax” and “Vitamin Sea” and “Toes in the Sand” wooden signs that decorate every beach rental on Seven Mile Island. I thought I’d seen everything, and then I walked past the infusion cafe on Dune Drive and that’s when I knew that I had seen it all. 

Yes, I know. But I don’t know how to explain this except to say that there is a place right next to a yoga studio that offers infusions–honest to God stick a needle in your arm INFUSIONS– of various solutions purported to improve one’s skin, boost one’s energy, balance one’s emotions, and I don’t even know what else. I don’t have any idea what these solutions contain nor if the personnel administering the infusions have any medical qualifications whatsoever. I walked past the place with my friend and her daughter yesterday at 10:30 or so in the morning and after we wisecracked for a bit about scheduling infusions in between our hair and nail appointments, we also noticed that the place was pretty much empty. Normally, I feel a little sorry for storefront businesses that seem to be on the brink of failure but I took it as a hopeful sign for civilization that offered the opportunity to submit to snake oil infusions at the hands of amateurs, rich women (the place is 100 percent geared toward a wealthy female clientele) are wisely deciding to skip the dodgy infusion treatments and just drink water and take vitamins and see a doctor every so often. Common sense prevails sometimes, and that is all to the good. 

*****

It’s Wednesday morning now, mid beach week. I’m on the deck again, looking at the garden of the beach house next door. I could just call it a house but it’s very distinctly a beach house of a particular Avalon style, long and narrow, with gray clapboard-style siding and white trim. This type of house appears from the front to be a tiny little cottage but the view from the back, which is my view, makes clear that it’s a full-size house–long and narrow, but big. 

The garden of this house is also very typical of Avalon gardens in August, full of hydrangea that are beginning to fade and crape myrtle that are in peak bloom, with some black-eyed susans and those orange daisy-looking flowers whose name I don’t know and won’t bother to look up. And right in the middle are two huge sunflowers, well over six feet tall. I don’t know if they are intentional or opportunists (“volunteers” as my gardening friend calls such plants that just appear without having been installed by a gardener) but they look like they’re in charge of all the other flowers, towering high above the garden, not exactly lording it over their lesser brethren but keeping watch whether or not anyone wants or needs them to keep watch. Very pleased with themselves, that is how those sunflowers look. And why shouldn’t they be? No other flower can attain that height and it’s more than likely that no one planted them there, and so they are proud of the hardy stock from which they came, a variety so adventurous and independent that it can spring from the soil unaided by human hands and outshine its cultivated friends in a matter of weeks. Yes they’re full of themselves but maybe they earned the right to be.

*****

It’s Thursday now. It’s 8:40 AM and I’m sitting on the deck again, which is drying out after an overnight storm. That’s the best kind of beach storm–the ones that begin around 10 PM and rage for the next 8 hours or so, getting all of the rain out of the atmosphere’s system in time for another lovely beach day. 

Actually, I don’t really mind a rainy day or two at the beach, and it’s not yet clear that this will be a sunny day. It’s still cloudy and wet. A little patch of blue is fighting for a place amid the clouds, but that is a fight that could go either way. We’ll see what happens. Meanwhile, I have Plans A and B for today so if the clouds win then we’ll execute the contingency plan. 

*****

I know that this has been a busy news week but I have remained near-ignorant of current events. Of course it’s hard not to know that there was an FBI raid in Florida. (“If it can happen to a former President, then it can happen to anyone!” Well, yeah, it can happen to anyone who spends four years criming for 12 hours a day–I think that’s the point). But aside from that very happy news, I have no idea what’s happening in the non-beach world. I’ll listen to news radio on my way home on Saturday, and scroll Twitter, and I’ll be caught up by the time we’re crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge out of New Jersey. Catching up on news is part of the re-entry process. It can wait until Saturday. 

*****

Friday morning is a little bit cloudy and overcast but it seems likely that the sun will come out and our last full day here will be a perfect beach day. Yesterday, it rained a bit more later in the morning and then remained cloudy and cool and damp until about 3 pm when the sun emerged and immediately burned off the remaining damp and cool. The temperature, it seemed, went from 75 to 88 in a matter of moments. We had already had a very nice day, browsing the Stone Harbor shops in the morning, and then bike riding and beach walking and reading in the afternoon. When the sun came out, my husband and older son, settled into their cloudy day lounging, decided to stay put, but my younger son and I put on suits, ran down to the beach for a bit to test the water and finding it colder than we like, drove to my sister’s beach rental (60 blocks away), which has a pool. We swam laps with my nephew and then went to the boys’ favorite ice cream place. Beach week pro tip: Get your ice cream at 4 PM rather than 9 PM. The lines are much shorter. 

*****

Thursday of beach week is when I feel like I’m completely adjusted to vacation life; like I’m fully settled into the town and the daily routine of morning walk or bike ride and afternoon beach time and swimming and the house where we are staying. That is the day when I really feel that I’ve left my normal life behind. By Friday, I’m thinking about reentry, but I won’t worry about packing or preparing for our trip home until tomorrow. We’ve done this so many times that we just need two hours on Saturday morning to pack our bags, clean up the house a bit (a service will come in and clean it properly), attach the bikes to the carrier rack, drop off the keys, and go. That’s all for tomorrow. We’re still on vacation today. 

*****

Let's look at the data, shall we? Let's look at some metrics. 

• 7 days. 6 sunny, 1 partly sunny and partly rainy. Average daytime temperature 85. Average nighttime temperature 68. Ocean water temperatures were unseasonably cool, in the low 60s, but that didn't stop us from swimming because almost nothing does.
• Four books: One nonfiction, one novel, one biography, and one memoir. 
• Lots of shells collected. I didn't count them and won't but I'm going to say that we got somewhere between 50 and 60 shells, mostly clam shells with a few oyster and scallop shells for variety. 
• 7 Wordle wins. 
• 2 ice cream cones and one "banana whip," which tastes exactly as advertised, like frozen bananas whipped into a kind of froth. It was pretty good, and frozen bananas are as good a vehicle for jimmies as ice cream.
• Wildlife: Two sunflowers, one skunk (we saw it before it saw us), dozens of seagulls (pests) and sandpipers (so cute) and a lone dolphin about which I had some questions, primarily where are your dolphin friends? That dolphin was swimming alone and it didn't leap out of the water even one time. I think that dolphin was a shark. 

Saturday, August 13, 7:30 AM

I woke up early on Saturday for one last bike ride and one last dip in the ocean (only up to my knees because I had already showered and dressed), and then returned for one last morning of coffee on the deck before the packing operation commenced. That part is easy for me because all I do is pack suitcases and totes. The men take care of the roof container and the bike racks. We dropped off our keys at 9:20, a full forty minutes early, and then after a late diner breakfast at a favorite place about an hour from Avalon, we were home before 1 PM. Two more weeks and summer is pretty much over. It goes so fast, almost as fast as Beach Week.