I must say that day 1 was a total success. That’s not to say that it didn’t have it’s ups and downs here and there, but overall, it was a success.
Let’s start at the beginning…
I wake up @ 4:30am on Friday morning. Yes, this is a mentally ill time to wake up on your first day of vacation. But, I am up this early because I am one of those people who prefers to pack and leave, rather than pack the night before. To me packing anytime before you actually plan on leaving is like a tease. It’s sorta like Christmas Eve when you were a kid. You know Christmas is coming, you decorate for it, plan for it, and then when it just about here, you’re so excited for it you end up getting 30 minutes of sleep. You wake up all excited to see what Santa brought you at like 5am, you wake everyone up, and proceed to open up all your presents. Then, when it’s time to go to grandma’s house around 1pm where the really good presents lie, you’re too freakin’ tired because like an ass you only got 30 minutes of sleep and have already been up for 6 hours. And now you’re asking what the hell all of that has to do with packing the day of. Well, it’s like this — I don’t get excited until I start packing to go somewhere. If I don’t pack, it’s just another day to me. So, if I go to bed at my regular time, wake up just a mere 15 minutes earlier then I usually do, and then pack, I’m all excited and pumped to go. If I do it the night before, I’m the kid who gets 30 minutes of sleep and ends up crashing once we get to the beach and misses everything.
Yes, that was a long way to go for such a menial thing. I thank you for still reading.
So, I’m up at 4:30, and just about everything packed and ready to go by 5:30am. All I am waiting on at this point is the little store at the end of street to open up at 5:30am so I can buy 3 bags of ice and pack all the perishables in the cooler. Once that has been accomplished, the car and myself are 100% packed and ready to go by 6am. Of course, my wife is not so much ready. so, while she showers and does her girly things, I watch ‘Spock’s Brain’ on TVLand. We finally leave the house at 7am. Even though we planned on leaving at 7am, I feel like we’re running late, but that’s just me.
So, we get everyone including the dog into the car. We hit up our respective ATMs to grab some cash for the weekend and we’re off to Sheetz to put some free air in my tires and to pick up some nice hot breakfast sandwhiches. After dining on the hood of my car a’la Alton Brown to avoid getting mauled by the dog, we’re off to Nazareth to pick up a beach umbrella from Brandi.
After picking up the umbrella, we are now off to Phillipsburg New Jersey to drop Loki off at my mother-in-law’s house for the weekend. It’s not that we can’t or don’t want to take Loki to the beach, it’s just that we’re afraid he’ll get loose, jump into the Atlantic Ocean, and swim to England. I’m not sure what it would be, but I’m thinking the postage to bring him home would be quite a bit. Anyway, after dropping Loki off we pick Kelly up. We have a slight spacial orientation issue with her luggage since my car is already packed to the gills with our 2 small bags and food for all 4 of us this weekend. After we finally managed to get everything in, we were off to fill up on the cheap Jersey gas ($2.47 a gallon!!) and we were off to Sandy Hook beach in beautiful Highlands, New Jersey!
And this is where we hit our first real snag.
Jess was in charge of getting all the directions. This was great. What was not so great is that my loving bride decided to go to MapQuest for directions rather than Google Maps. Yeah…I can hear your cringing too. So, a few wrong turns later and we’re on what appears to be the right roads. After an abrupt 3 lane crossover so I could hit a road stop to pee, we once again hit our second directions snafu. They want us to take an exit that doesn’t really exist. So, we play a hunch, and take what exit we think is right. After 20 minutes of driving, we are rewarded by literally driving into the ocean. Happy with ourselves, we head to find where our little cottage we’ve rented is.
This is where it gets interesting again.
The guy we’re renting it from has no knowledge that we are supposed to stay here. Granted, I know it’s tough since he’s only been emailing with my wife at least once a week since June. Oh yeah, he also took our $200 deposit that he now has no record of either. Jess asks to use his laptop so she can bring up their emails. So, he fires up his dial-up modem, yes — dial-up, and she attempts to log into her Gmail account. Not being a patient man, I go out to the car, unbury my laptop, bring it in, fire it up, and find an open AP and log into her Gmail account. Now, I did this as she was logging in on his dial-up connection. That’s how slow his dial-up was. So after showing him email after email and proof of our deposit, she finally remembers and gives us our cottage once we pay the $200 balance. (It was actually more painful then that, but I honestly don’t want to relive it all again)
So, we unpack the car and setup our ‘cozy’ 1 room cottage. (Pics will follow later) We make some sandwhiches for lunch, get dressed, and head for the beach.
We had a most wonderful time at the beach. While Katie was on her way, we decided to hitup Google Maps on my phone and find a nice habachi place for dinner. We found one about 9 miles away, called them up, and make 8pm reservations for the 4 of us. (What did people do before cell phones and mobile internet connections??) So, after about 3 hours we head back to the cottage from the beach, shower off all the the sand in not-so-nice places, and get dressed for dinner.
Katie gets here in just the nick of time, and we’re off to dinner. I could go into more details but I don’t want to, so I am going to say that we picked a nicer establishment because we were running a nice $100 credit for dinner. No, please don’t ask how or why. So, we get to the place and it is indeed very classy. We all order some top shelf habachi, and Jess and I each get a roll of sushi. While partaking the in the habachi experience, I discover one of my new favorite drinks of all time — Tokyo Tea. It is green tea, sake, lime and mint on a glass. It may not sound good, but by God they were good enough for me to down 2 of them within 20 minutes at $8 a piece. Yeah, that good. So, after all is said and done we get the bill. Jess plays guess the total with everyone and we all underbid. No Showcase Showdown for us. Anyway, after tip the bill was $230. I know, you’re freaking our right now. But, let’s do the math. We had a $100 credit, so the bill comes down to $130. Now, there are 4 of us, so that in the end works out to be $33 a piece. $33 for me to have lobster and steak habachi, an eel and avacaddo roll, and 3 drinks (1 soda, 1 alcoholic) plus tip is not that bad at all. Plus, keep in mind we’re at a top shelf place that is literally right on the ocean. Not too shabby at all.
So, not content with the alcohol we’ve all just consumed at dinner, and still not content with the alcohol we’ve brought with us, we head to a 24hr place and buy more. After picking up 4 six packs of varied alcohol, we head back to the cottage of doom and relax. It was fun. After about 3 hours of drinking, we all decided to crash for the night. But a lot happened in that time. Kelly mooned all of us, which was nice since I got that on video. (can you say YouTube?) Kelly called Joel drunk. Jess couldn’t really hear/understand anyone so that made for some interesting made-up conversations. Oh yeah, and we all felt Kelly’s boobs since she was saying how firm they were. The worst part for me was that after 3 drinks, I wasn’t even buzzed. I think I was honestly too tired to get a buzz on. Which is a good thing since I didn’t want to drink too much anyway. After all, the last thing I want to do the next day with a hangover is jump into a rough ocean.
So, here I am at 7:30am, sitting out in the patio eating a Pop-Tart and having a Diet Pepsi, blogging away on someone’s open WIFI. Everyone else is till sleeping, which I think is a good thing. I’ll wake them all up around 9am, we’ll hit up a beach shop or two, and then spend the day at the beach. I have a feeling a good time will be had by all!
