Apologies for the terrible pun - I couldn't resist.
This past weekend consisted of a series of weird connections that all fell together to create a great time. In other words, I had a blast.
Chris, a friend of mine from Visalia, was in NYC for the week as part of an east coast trip he's on. He's a runner and he emailed me to ask about some good running routes in the city, and we ended up meeting twice to run along the Hudson and around Central Park. He told me that his cousin Justin had moved to Long Island with his wife about a year and a half ago and that they were planning a beach trip on Saturday. I'd met Justin and his brother, Evan, once before, and Chris invited me to crash the trip and join them. I was more than happy to do it.
On Saturday morning, Chris and I found ourselves part of a large crowd of other beach-goers in Penn Station. The Long Island Rail Road has several routes, and there's a signboard with the names of the trains and the schedule up above the tracks. That part was straightforward enough, but it turns out that the track number appears just a few minutes before the train is scheduled to depart, presumably because no one knows which track it will arrive on until it actually arrives. After excessive commentary on the stupidity of this system (mostly from me - Chris is more merciful), we resigned ourselves to gazing upward at the name of the train we planned to take. I kept wishing I had the forthrightness to take a picture of the crowd, all staring blankly in the same direction. Another train's track lit up before ours did, and about half of the crowd immediately woke from the spell and hurried off towards the platform. Ours, too, was announced after a few more minutes, and we dashed off for the track, jockeying for position and ending up with pretty good window seats. The LIRR is clean, comfortable, and relatively fast. It was outside the urban sprawl pretty quickly, leaving us with about 40 minutes' worth of beautiful green countryside before we pulled into Huntington, the final stop. Justin and Evan (who lives in DC but was visiting for the weekend) picked us up, and we headed beachward to meet up with Marli, Justin's wife, and some friends of theirs.
We couldn't have asked for a better day for the beach, or "the shore" as New Yorkers call it. It was clear and sunny, but not too hot for what seemed like the first time in ages. It was more crowded than I've ever seen a beach, but we were told that it was a pretty small showing. We lounged, ate lunch, swam in water that would have been far more pleasant had Justin not told us about the 18-foot great white shark that had washed up recently, then lounged some more. On a walk down the beach I found the broken bottom of a beer bottle, a dead horseshoe crab, lots of giant clamshells, and countless strands of seaweed that were infatuated with my ankles. There weren't really waves to speak of, and what little there were broke just before hitting the edge of the sand, so no one was boogie boarding or surfing. Justin (or was it Evan?) observed that in California, people tend to go to the beach to do things, whereas on Long Island people go to be seen. Judging by the umber pelts of the sunbathers all around us, Long Islanders like to be seen a lot. Were it not for Elena, Marli's fair-skinned friend, I'd have felt very out of place.
Five planes wrote this message - a Geico ad - by flying in tight formation and emitting a small cloud of smoke in unison at intervals to form the letters. I'd never seen anything like it before.
We followed our beach trip with showers at Justin and Marli's house and dinner at Elena and her husband Adam's house. It was unusually thrilling to ride in a car that wasn't a cab, help serve food in a full-sized kitchen, play with pet dogs in a back yard, and sit on a porch swing. Much as I love my life in New York City, I have missed these things. I'm not sure I'll be able to get in another beach trip this summer, but next year I'm going to start early.
No comments:
Post a Comment