Showing posts with label newjersey. Show all posts

down the shore: Jersey shore recommendations

Don't you dare make me choose between the beach or the mountains, but if pressed, I will always and forever say the ocean—a Jersey girl through and through. My friend Angie recently asked to pick my brain on Jersey shore tips and recommendations and I thought I would write them up similar to other travel recommendations I've shared in the past!

Many Jersey beaches notoriously require beach tags—a pass to use the beach (which pays for lifeguards, trash removal, and keeping the beaches in pristine condition, among other things) which can typically be purchased for the day, week, or season. There are a number of free beaches interspersed as well (should the concept of beach tags prove an impediment either philosophically or financially) along the south Jersey shore.

I have personally spent the most time in Ocean City, Wildwood, Atlantic City, and Cape May, though have been to others as well (Stone Harbor, for one, as evidenced by the childhood photo at the beginning of this post!). When I was a teenager, I loved the sand bar of Atlantic City's beaches for boogie boarding, and Wildwood has a great boardwalk and really nice beaches as well (the location of a most infamous skates [a stingray lookalike] sighting when I was in high school, which resulted in a horde of screaming teenage girls running in from the water; only afterwards did we learn skates are harmless).

HELPFUL LINKS:

Free Jersey shore beaches

guide to all Jersey beaches

Philadelphia Inquirer: other transit options to the shore



FAVORITE SHORE TOWNS & RECOMMENDATIONS/NOTES:

  • Ocean City (NOT to be confused with the lesser Ocean City, Maryland!!) is my all-time favorite, in terms of the beach and the boardwalk. Beach tags are required in OC and can be purchased for daily, weekend, or seasonal durations. There are booths along the boardwalk where you can purchase with cash, or you can use a card at the Ocean City Music Pier office (on the boardwalk between 8th and 9th street and also a convenient location for public restrooms). When you enter the beach from the various ramps or stairs down from the boardwalk, there are beach staff who will need to see your beach tag. When you're out on the beach (definitely on weekends) an employee will come around periodically to check for beach tags. Some people pin theirs to their swimsuit or clothing, but I usually attach mine to my bag in a prominent/visible spot so I can easily show it but it won't get lost or washed off by waves while I'm in the water.

    There are several paid municipal parking lots close to the boardwalk but they are more expensive and tend to fill up early, but nice if you have a lot of beach gear or small kids with you as you won't have to walk far. There is some metered street parking as well but usually it is only for up to 2 hours, so you just have to keep an eye on the time to move your car. I can usually find free street parking if I am willing to walk a little further.




My go-to blocks of the boardwalk and beach are from about 8th to 12th street, but the boardwalk officially begins at 1st street and extends all the way to 23rd so there is lots to explore! (There is a certain ubiquity of vendors along the boardwalk so I don't think an exhaustive tour of the entire length is necessary, but it is definitely possible!) My favorite food vendors are all easily accessible along this stretch from 8th-12th, along with Ocean City Music Pier for beach tags and bathrooms. When you get down to the beach, you can also channel the Amalfi Coast by renting striped umbrellas and beach chairs (or boogie boards!) from Bert's! I just did this for the first time and it was lovely—the high schoolers staffing the booth will set up your chairs and umbrella, and if you need to relocate due to the tide coming in, you just have to ask and they will help you get re-situated above the tide line. They advertised a deal on their website for 2 chairs and an umbrella for the day which was overall very reasonable, and well worth the cost in my opinion.

Ocean City favorites:
    • Manco & Manco's Pizza
    • Kohn Bros. custard
    • boardwalk fries w/ malt vinegar
    • Shriver's salt water taffy (pro tip: store your taffy in the fridge and take a piece out and wait a few minutes before eating. It will soften enough to eat but the time in the fridge will allow the wax paper double-layer wrapper to peel off very easily with no mess!)
    • Fudge Kitchen
    • My favorite shop for tshirts/sweatshirts/hats/etc. (reasonable pricing and they have some great embroidered designs!) is the Shirt Shack, but I feel like I inevitably go in every store to try and find just what I am looking for because it is a boardwalk ritual.

  • Wildwood also has a boardwalk (with Kohr Bros!) and is probably my favorite of the free beaches I've been to. I haven't been since I was a teen but am hoping to revisit this summer!

  • Atlantic City is notorious for many things, but my favorite thing about it is that it provided the origins for the game Monopoly with many of its street names. When I was in high school, Atlantic City was my favorite beach for boogie boarding as it had a really nice, long sandbar. Obviously sand is subject to erosion and deposition and sedimentation, so there's not telling how much things have changed since then, but it's another of the free beach towns with a boardwalk and one of the longest seaside resorts in the country. And this summer (not sure if it's an annual thing or just this year) they have a free jazz series of concerts on the beach! Atlantic City is also the best/most expedient option if you are taking the train from Philly rather than driving!

  • Cape May, at the southernmost point of New Jersey, is quaint and has an abundance of brightly colored Victorian houses. It's also an excellent area for birding! (beach tags required) Cape May also boasts the Cape May-Lewes ferry which you can take to Delaware if you are visiting any of the Delaware beaches and prefer the sea route rather than driving on the highways.


SOMEWHAT CONFUSING BUT HOPEFULLY USEFUL DRIVING DIRECTIONS! 

As far as accessing the beaches, there are several ways to get to them, but many face lots of notoriously bad shore traffic on the weekends (be advised!). The Atlantic City Expressway is a toll road that bypasses the back roads of New Jersey in a more direct diagonal path across south Jersey, especially if you are coming from the Philadelphia area. I feel it tends to get a bit backed up in the summer, so it does not always end up being faster. My preferred but probably confusing (anytime anyone spouts driving directions of any kind to me my mind goes blank and I retain none of it, but never fear, I have a TL;DR GPS hack immediately after it) driving route is below.

MY PREFERRED ROUTE: From Philly I recommend taking I-76 East over the Walt Whitman Bridge. Follow signs for Route 42 (there is one interchange right after the bridge where the signage is a little unclear but just don't get off any exits into Camden and stay the course; then the signs immediately after this start showing Route 42. Someday maybe eventually I will contact NJDOT and ask them fix this oversight/point of confusion that still throws me off even though I have drive this route literally hundreds of times). Take Route 42 and then follow signs for and exit onto Route 55 (the signage will say Glassboro/Vineland in case city names are easier to remember than route numbers). You can wave to my family as you pass the Centerton exit! Continue on Route 55, and eventually take Exit 24 for Route 49-E via Tuckahoe. You'll turn left onto Route 49 and then stay on Route 49 until you reach Tuckahoe (about 16 miles). Turn right at the stop sign onto Rt. 50-S (which curves left; stay on 50-South for 1.9 miles). If you are going to points further south than Ocean City, you can stay on Route 50-S which eventually ends at the Garden State Parkway (running parallel to the Ocean). If you are going to Ocean City, after 1.9 miles, turn left onto Tuckahoe Road. Stay on Tuckahoe Road for 5 miles, where it changes to Old Tuckahoe Road, and then curves and becomes Roosevelt Blvd. Stay on Roosevelt Blvd for about 2.5 miles and you will reach a stoplight and intersection with Bay Avenue—you made it to Ocean City! Turn left onto Bay Avenue and once you reach a street number commensurate with the area of the boardwalk you'd like to go to, you can turn right and navigate to one of the cross streets parallel with and increasingly closer to the ocean to look for parking.

TL;DR/GPS HACK: if all of the above is way too confusing (sorry! but also not sorry!), just set your GPS for Millville, NJ upon leaving Philadelphia, then when you get on Route 55 or get closer to Millville, update the location to Ocean City, NJ. The main issue is just that the GPS apps will default to the Atlantic City Expressway which is only faster when there is *no* traffic, which is highly unlikely/unusual on a summer weekend! This confusing method of my insider directions will spare you being parked on the expressway and will allow you to subvert the default route supplied by GPS when it inevitably tries to take you via a route you don't want to go. There will likely be shore traffic but it is usually not as bad as the expressway, at least in my experience!


If you are coming from Maryland/Delaware/DC/points further south, some kind soul on this forum has written up those instructions (which kind of merges with my preferred instructions above after you get on Route 55 and may in fact be easier to follow than what I wrote above: 

Someone posted these directions for me last year and I used them. They were great -- spot on and nice back roads through NJ. Also, there is always the Ferry, which is fun.
I-95 thru Delaware, cross the Del-Mem Bridge. Take the "last exit before toll" (Rt. 40). Follow it thru Woodstown and Elmer to Rt. 55. Exit onto 55 is just before you get to Malaga. Go South on 55 through Vineland and Millville. Exit onto Rt. 49 (look for the big water tower off the highway). Follow 49 to Tuckahoe. Turn right onto Rt. 50, and follow till you get to the split off to Tuckahoe Road. (623?). At Marmora, the road turns into Roosevelt Blvd. follow Roosevelt Blvd across Rt. 9 and under the GSP and into OCNJ. (This route will drop you onto the island at 34th Street. Have a great vacation! (3 to 3.5 hours, depending on where you are starting from and when you are going 'down the shore.)


I may update this as I revisit other shore towns this summer but I wanted to get my baseline recommendations compiled and written so I can share them while there is still a lot of summer left to enjoy the lovely Jersey shore! (take me with you!)

 . . . . 

on a related note: I love this print of Jersey shore towns by illustrator Libby VanderPloeg and Haptic Lab's Jersey shore quilt is probably going to be my graduation gift to myself in a few years.

dispatches from the garden state: a photo essay


There are very few people who truly appreciate what I mean when I tell them I am from the Garden State.

Just now, writing that, I am suddenly feeling very nostalgic for my graphic tee from dELiA*s that bore a cute illustration and caption: "the Garden State: it grows on you!" (have just now returned from an internet rabbit hole of teen fashion research because apparently dELiA*s met an early demise but they have since made a comeback—although they certainly seemed alive and well when I shopped there as a teenager in the twenty-aughts!)

All this to say, I get as many blank stares when I say I grew up amongst forests and farmlands as I dole out when someone replies to my introductory pleasantries with a "New Joy-sey" (for the record: I do not know one! single! soul! who pronounces it such and is actually from the state; the people who say this are always New Yorkers/from Staten Island!!!).

Shocking, I know (particularly when witticisms like this abound in popular culture. Those jokes only apply to Newark)—but I grew up in a truly beautiful part of the state: south Jersey with its greenery and glorious produce. A couple summers ago (2017, to be precise), I was home for a visit to my parents and extended family, and I realized that I had a deep longing to capture the New Jersey I know and love in photographs. During my visit, my mom obliged me with many roadside stops (or in some cases,  simply slow-downs) so I could try and capture these familiar scenes of my upbringing.

Even these photos and this small photo essay do not truly do my homeland justice. To be perfectly honest, my dream is to spend a month in June or July back home, with nothing else to do but drive back roads (which are all of them) and stop at every tiny roadside farm stand, documenting this singular wonderful tradition. The notion of a proper 'farmers market' (booths and stalls and crowds and the like) was unknownst to me until I encountered them in Union Square in NYC and likewise in other big cities; where I grew up, you just stopped at the farm on your way home from wherever you had been coming or going. My family has our tried-and-true favorites (Mood's, Schober's, Grasso Girls), mostly out of convenience of the routes we frequented, but many more whose names and locations I could not possibly recall, because of their glorious plentitude.

Although I've spent nearly all my adulthood in Utah (college + post-college), I will always be a Jersey girl at heart—it is where I was raised and home of the worldview that shaped so much of who I am. A favorite story to illustrate this point: when I planned a week-long camping trip in the Canadian Rockies, I had planned out our menu in advance to simplify our grocery stop for produce before entering the park (having brought the dry goods with us). At a Walmart in Edmonton, Alberta, I asked my friend Laura how many ears of corn she wanted. She gave me a strange look and replied, "one." A few days later, I started a pot of water to boil over our campfire and we shucked the corn cobs. Because I had planned and orchestrated all of this, Laura and our fellow camper and friend Angie looked to me for direction on what other prep they could help with. I explained that the prep was done, as I dropped our four-total ears of corn into the pot to cook. Laura's exclamation and dawning realization still make me laugh to this day: "When you asked me how many ears of corn I wanted, I didn't know that corn was THE ENTREE!" I kid you not that it had honestly never occurred to me that corn wouldn't be the entrée, comprising most of a classic summer meal. When I told my parents this story, we all had a good laugh, and I expressed that my gastronomic-homesickness for Jersey sweet corn will likely never ever dissipate. I usually find all other corn to be insipid, grainy, and altogether disappointing in comparison to the corn of my childhood. It may simply be that I find the produce of my home state altogether superior in every way. I am probably not wrong—we are named for it, after all.

Anecdotes aside, I hope this post makes you smile and gives you a small glimpse into the landscapes and foods that feel like home to me.

fun fact: Hammonton blueberries (of HAMMONTON, NEW JERSEY—BLUEBERRY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD and home to the annual blueberry fest) will always be my favorite blueberries. Some of our dear family friends lived in Hammonton when I was growing up and I was always jealous of/loved their blueberry shirts, with the Top Crop top-hatted-cane-wielding blueberry mascot. 

Every summer, my dad would buy several flats of blueberries, which we'd rinse and then store in our basement chest freezer. All winter long, we'd have fresh-frozen blueberries for our Honey Bunches of Oats with almonds (or other cereal of choice). <3 Dare I say, fresh frozen blueberries are far superior to their freezer-aisle counterparts.

"NO NASTY PEOPLE"—this is so dead-on South Jersey and I love it.

LOPES. need I say more.


New Jersey, I love you forever. But especially in the summertime.

as quaint as can be


A while back, I was looking at something on Google maps in a town close to mine and loved that the tractor driving down the road made it onto the Google maps imagery—an all-too-common sight. I think I should start describing my homeland as 'small-town Iowa, plus trees.'

It's always sunny

My memories of summer revolve around what everything revolves around: the sun.
There is something about the quality of the sunlight in the summer months—its long slants as it dips westernly, the way it sparkles in the morning full of promise of good days ahead.
Mine is a love-hate relationship with the sun. As a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde, I burn like nobody’s business and have a family history of skin cancer to boot. But the sunshine is what makes summer...well, summer. It is especially poignant to consider it now, in the dead of winter, when the days are dreary and short, and the sun dips below the horizon before I’ve even had a chance to take a deep breath after the work day is through.
When I was in Morocco, we talked with some Canadian girls at one of our hostels, one of whom assured us that an excursion to the desert was not to be missed. She said they even saw the sun rise! She had never seen a sunrise before. What?! Was an opinion from someone who’s never seen the sun rise one to be trusted? Probably not.*
My earliest memories of summer shift between several locales from my childhood: Bethany Beach, Delaware;  upstate New York;  and Long Island.
East coasters that we were, we would head to our beachside mecca yearly with our family friends—their beach house in Bethany was a constant of my childhood summers. My sisters and I would walk up before dawn, slip out of our downstairs bunk beds, and head out to the cool sand to watch the sun rise, a pink orb floating up over the ocean. We’d get back in bed, then wake up at a more reasonable hour to frivol away our days in the water or sipping orangeade downtown. Days on the beach bring back the sunny associations of summer: slathering on sunscreen and slathering on more after we dried off from our swimming and crashing through the waves.
In Upstate New York, we’d hoe pumpkins in between adventures on my grandparents’ farm. It was always tricky knowing how to dress—the morning air was the slightest bit chilly, but as soon as the sun came up, you’d regret a choice of long sleeves. We’d hoe pumpkins from the dim early morn until mid-afternoon, the sun high above our heads. Squinting our eyes to spot the end of the row, the sun was relentless. We’d toss the bottle of sunscreen down the row for when we’d need it later, though with each application, we’d grow considerably grimier with another layer of dirt blent in. The rest of our daylight hours would be spent in the treehouse, clambering up the creek behind Ariel’s house, or picking wildflowers to make daisy chains. The sun always seemed like a friend in the afternoons, after it was no longer ticking away the slow hours until we’d be done hoeing.
On Long Island, our days and weeks were spent with cousins running out of doors, climbing trees, making trips to the library, the ice cream shop, the Red Deli—wherever our bikes or our feet or our wagon would take us. The sun, again, plays prominently on this summer stage. My worst sunburn in memory happened at 418 Smith Avenue. We swam in the pool for the entire day (possibly taking a couple of breaks to eat a popsicle or two). At my young age, I was in no place to be responsible for my own sunscreen application and didn’t think twice until we went inside that night. Already my backside was tender and red as a lobster. I spent the week sleeping on my stomach, aloe vera plastering my t-shirt painfully to my skin. Never again! And yet, every year, I usually end up with one bad sunburn before I sufficiently wisen up.
Away from the peer pressures and opinions of high school, I’ve come to embrace my ivory skin, donning a wide-brimmed sunhat at the pool and setting a timer to go off every two hours during my mountain hikes so goodness knows I won’t forget to reapply my SPF 50. And so my love-hate relationship with the sun has muted into one of mutual understanding; Vive l’été!


————
*writer's note (these are the kinds of things we talk about in our writing club): I can't tell if this makes sense here; I was drawing a comparison of sorts between this girl who'd NEVER SEEN THE SUN RISE and my earliest memories of summer, watching sunrises on the beach. There's probably a better way to connect these ideas but it's late and I'm playing catch-up :)

1000BlackGirlBooks


Marley Dias is my new literary heroine! She is an 11-year old school girl from New Jersey (represent!) and was frustrated that her fifth grade language arts curriculum was made up only of books about "white boys and dogs."

She wanted to read books with viewpoints more representative of her race and experience—now the center of her book drive: #1000BlackGirlBooks. She is collecting books to donate to a library in her mom's Jamaican hometown featuring black female protagonists—not side or supporting characters, but main characters.

Here are a couple of articles with more information (and the address to donate/send books to!!), plus a video from the local news on Marley's and her friends' website. Love love love.

I also contributed to this growing list on Goodreads and I've added several books to my to-read list in my research: Her Stories: African American Folk Tales, Fairytales, and True Tales; Of Thee I Sing: A Letter To My Daughters; The Girl Who Spun Gold; and Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons.

I was so delighted to learn about this amazing girl and her incredible vision and verve—the media is so full of garbage about people who don't deserve attention or laud, so I wanted to raise my voice and share my support of Marley's amazing project. Our world needs more people like her.

Christmas cheer


Recently, I've been posing this question to friends: what are your favorite Christmas traditions?
Most of mine are fairly simple, and mostly food-related. I love going home at Christmas and making food with my family. My sister gave my dad an ebelskivers pan for Christmas and we made those for the first time--Nutella filled? Yes please.

South Jersey is also home to many people of Italian or Italian-American descent, and my mom usually brings home a box of homemade pizzelles from one of her colleagues at work. YUM. (They are widely available in south Jersey/Philly, but even better when homemade; these make me nostalgic for the area where I grew up.)


Some of my other favorite foods to make at Christmastime are: Gingerbread waffles - this recipe
and Gingerbread spice Dutch baby - Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (recipe online here).


above: Christmas decorations in Madrid's Plaza del Sol (Those chandeliers were amazing!) and below: Christmas decorations in London--love; below that: NuSkin's Christmas lights are always stunning.


M and I went to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert and enjoyed the lights on Temple Square and some hot chocolate at Hatch--the best. (I just learned my sister Lauren has NEVER BEEN to see the Christmas lights at Temple Square! What?! How?!)


And of course, I love when friends come to town for the holidays and we can meet up. I hope your Christmas was a happy one.

summer

quintessential:
endlessly sunny days
poolside & channeling our inner Audrey
a small creamiscle twist at Cream Valley Custard (during my visit at home sweet home)

oaks

[looking from my backyard into my front yard. I love these trees.]

fireflies // lightning bugs

I use the names interchangeably, but when I was home this weekend, I wanted to try and capture them on camera. I love this photo, because it the snapshot of a perfect summer night: dusk in my neighborhood and the elusive motion of the fireflies.

happy birthday Lauren!

Happy birthday Lauren!! You are one of the most considerate and kind people I know. I love your creativity (and photography!), your spunk, and knack for baking. I wish I was home so I could return the favor and make you some Halloween birthday cupcakes. But it's the thought that counts, right?

LOVE YOUUU! Happy birthday, I hope it's great.

(p.s. these photos make me miss you, NJ, and summer. in that order.)

carnival of the animals

currently loving this piece from Saint Saen's "Carnival of the Animals."

(The sound quality of that video isn't the best, but I love Yo-Yo Ma so the choice was obvious. This photo taken several years ago in New Jersey also seemed rather appropriate.)

South Jersey spring.


 I love these orchards and I love these trees. Spring might just be my favorite season in NJ.

cream valley

My mom told me that our family's favorite ice cream stand just opened again for the summer!


And now I am currently craving some creamsicle soft serve from Cream Valley [Custard] (but no one calls it by the full name).

on trees and architecture

(my front yard in New Jersey)

I'm in an Italian conversation class and one of the things we discussed in class this week was living in the countryside versus living in a city. I'm the most indecisive person on the planet and couldn't choose between the two, but when we all voted, I went with country over city (my rural south Jersey upbringing won out).

A large element in my indecision is a toss-up between my love of architecture and of trees. That may seem like a ridiculous comparison, but I think there is truth in it. In a city, you have a far greater concentration of architectural works as opposed to a rural area. But in a rural area, there are trees (or mountains!).

Both of these things are sources of inspiration for me. I love man-made architectural forms and I love seeing an architect's interpretation of an idea in a physical sense. Architecture affects so many other facets of life, because we live our lives in it. Likewise, I am awed by nature and the creation of so many incredible things in this world. I'm not the only one; many of my favorite architects and designers found much of their inspiration in nature—Alvar Aalto and Frank Lloyd Wright are some notable examples.

(Bryant Park in Manhattan)

These two very different things seem innately related to me, so while most people can easily decide city or country, I have a harder time since I really am torn over the issue. I guess that isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just typical me, being typically indecisive.

violets are actually violet...

Why hello, state flower of New Jersey. Nice to see you.


Does this mean that it's spring? I'm done with the snow and cold. Warm weather and sunshine for me, yes please.

an ode to summer

(and to the daisies growing on the side of the road in my neighborhood)


"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
-Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays (translation from French)

the Amish farmer's market

One of my favorite places to go when I'm home is a nearby Amish farmer's market. It's absolutely the greatest, and is open year round (many farmer's markets in south jersey are only open seasonally)!

 Candy cane candy corn! I never knew this existed (neither did Emily).
Old and new favorites found only at the Amish farmer's market... blueberry yogurt pretzels, candy covered sunflower seeds, and Chips! (these Ricola candies are the closest thing I can think of, but Chips are Italian... and apparently can be bought on Amazon too, but those aren't quite the same ones... I dedicate this candy analysis to my mom, Aunt Laura, and cousin Sarah.)

My sisters and me with our Grandma, who also loves the farmer's market and lives even closer to it than we do!

South Jersey people and places, I miss you already.
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