Jersey Girl

I think I could be a Jersey Girl. A girl could get used to this life.

I spent the weekend in the Dirty Jerz with an old college flatmate. She grew up on the shore and moved back there after college in the midwest. I can definitely see why.

I'd heard all kinds of things about the Jersey Shore. Big hair, Guidos, mallrats, all those 80's stereotypes swirled in my head as I boarded my train in Penn Station (having missed the original train I should have taken because I was still drunk from a work happy hour Friday night that somehow turned into about 6 happy hours and at one point included me doing an impression of Bill Clinton during the Monica scandal and laughing my head off, as though this were still an amusing and timely cultural reference. But I maintain that missing the train the next morning was less my fault than the fault of the damn G train, which functions about as well as a lab rat that has had carcinogenic age-defying makeup tested on it.)

So I was an hour late when J. picked me up at the station, anxious to hit the beach. A quick stop at her house to drop off my stuff, then a short drive, and there it was. The Atlantic Ocean. A confession: I'd never seen the true Atlantic from America before. I've seen the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and while I was living in England I saw the Atlantic from the other side. I've seen Long Island Sound and the East River but never the wide open expanse of sparkling blue ocean stretching clear over to my old home across the pond. It was beautiful, just like I always dreamed it would be all those years ago when I first read about the Baby-Sitters' Club vacationing there and imagined that someday, I, like Stacey McGill, would fall in love with a cute older lifeguard and then have my heart broken at the end of my two week summer vacation and it would be terribly tragic and romantic, as eighth grade romances tend to be (for the record, Stacey McGill also inspired me to move to this city in the first place, but that's a story for another day.)

I was not disappointed all weekend, by the beach, the sun, the sand, the surf, the seaside outdoor restaurant we had crab cakes at, the boardwalk we wandered and bars we visited after sunset, the reunion with an old friend, meeting new people, and visiting a full service gas station for the second time in my life (it's the law in Jersey... how bizarre. I can pump my own gas, thanks very much.) It was a wonderful break from the city. I definitely understand why people get summer houses! Someday, I intend to be one of them.