6 months till christmas

We are as far away from Christmas as you can get and today is the first day we're going to the shore. It's supposed to be a great beach day, the first one in a long while. I just checked the weather for Sandy Hook and it's looking good!

We opted to sleep in rather than get up at an ugodly hour to drive across New Jersey in order to save on the $10 admission to Sandy Hook, which opens at 7:00. I know I'm a cheap bum, but I like to sleep in sometimes. To make it before 7:00 comfortably we would have had to leave around 4:30 a.m. YUCK.

Lambertville is almost directly west of Sandy Hook and on the other side of New Jersey. There are just three main roads to follow ... 518, 522 and 520. The last bit of the ride before we hit Sea Bright is through Rumson, where Janet had me stop at a lemonade stand being operated by Bruce. He was wearing a Journey tour shirt and a John Deere trucker's hat. Actually, throughout the ride we were worried for the clouds seemed more ominous than we expected. But the reports said it would be a beach day and when we left the leafy streets of Rumson and hit Route 36 in Sea Bright, it looked much more promising.

It was a great day at the beach. We arrived around 11:00 and did not leave until 6 p.m. After gettting Janet set up I went for a run. The last marathon I entered started at Sandy Hook and the first 8 miles of the race are lonely, for there are few people in the park at race time. I still like running along the multi use path they have that courses the length of Sandy Hook from the entrance to the Fort Hancock coast guard station at the north end. In all I ran about 5 miles.

Sufficiently sweaty I rejoined Janet and we relaxed in the full sun for the rest of the day, sneaking peeks at the other naked bodies that surrounded us. I had prepared some chicken and had some leftover pineapple salsa and we bought a beer from the beer guy on the beach for quite a good lunch. We went for a long walk along the surf, sometimes walking in the cold water knee deep, though we tactfully avoided going all the way in, unless nature called us! We also tactfully avoided a colleague of Janet's who was down at the southern end of the beach, wearing his trademark denim hat.

As we lolled under the cloudless sky we became painfully aware of several odd personalities that plied Gunnison's Beach. Janet and I have a great time making up knicknames for people. The fellow running the concession stand at the nude beach, his eyes never looking up at the myriad of body types, extra folds and all, was referred to as "beer guy", of course. Behind us, as we slowly revolved our chairs to face the sun arching across the sky, was "Meatloaf", who kept up a constant harangue about everything from trading with the Chinese to the death of Farrah Fawcett...we did not yet know about MJ... His grating voice was as loud as his belly was rotound. Before we rotated our chairs away from him, he stood posing in all his glory, arms akimbo and spewed out his diatribe to his little (but not in girth) clutch of friends. There's something good about the passage of time.

Throughout the day we listened to the bickering of a couple. We called them "Terminator" and "Iced T". He had a military haircut and physique, wore mirrored sunglasses and alternated between yelling at and canoodling with his tattooed and statuesque girlfriend, whose "high maintenance" attitude went well with her "high priced" boobs (or so Janet says). Iced T kept saying she was going to Arizona....see the connection... and Terminator would tell her to go now, loudly! Then they would lapse into a cuddle phase until the next round of complaints. The name "Terminator" replaced "Jarhead" when he said at one point he too hated his job...to which I started muttering to Janet in an Arnold voice that "humans are too easy to kill."

Aside from the varied and typically creepy men walking around trying to either ogle Janet or me, the latter usually adorned with tattooes, piercings and attachments to their nether regions, there was "Banana Man" who gained the name when he left, putting on a yellow t-shirt and a pair of tight-fitting yellow stetchy pants that revealed obscenly every centimeter of his old rickety ass even though he had just been fully naked. There was "Tent Boy" who struggled with a pop up tent, but never entered it, preferring to sit cross legged before it smoking cigarettes like a prostitute before a brothel. There was "The Ghost", a white haired, white skinned man whose color never reddened throughout the day though he lounged in the sun with his younger looking wife.

But the most disturbing character was "The Mushroom" and his companion whom we named "Dick-Girl". Mushroom wore tighty white briefs to the beach under his shorts. He never got fully naked and spent the day wearing just a white-shirt. It made him look like a mental patient looking for the toilet. Had he remained in his folding chair with his blanket wrapped around his head and allowed his "girlfriend" who also never got naked and wore double tops and a demin mini skirt, to writhe before him, he would have just been another weird person at Gunnisons. BUT...he would get up and walk around and stare at people. At one point Janet opened her eyes to see him hovering over her, lasciviously drooling. Now, it is appropriate to "look" at people, either for the "entertainment" or "grotesque" value, but you're supposed to give it a quick once over and not stare. This guy was creepy. His girlfriend was creepy. We thought she was a man, hence the name. But, we realized "Dick-Girl," was not an appropriate moniker for her when they eventually left and she flashed us while tucking in her shirt. The whole afternoon would have become unhinged if not for our ability to find the humor in everything. We laughed and laughed and shook our heads.

We stopped in Red Bank at a brew pub called Basil T's. They make several respectable beers and I had the IPA and a stout. Janet drank a Hefeweizen or wheat beer. The beers were adequate, but the cost of their food was outrageous. After drinking a couple rounds at the crowded bar we left, drove back across the state and into New Hope and we each had another beer and some very good wings at Triumph brewery. It was a good day, but of course every day is good when you're vacationing from home.

Thanks for reading....We're going to a Trenton Thunder AA baseball game Friday evening.
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