Beach Haven, NJ (LBI)

Since moving back to MN we get to see our east coast friends about once a year, maybe. Here I'm talking two other families, all with kids close in ages to ours (10 in total!), connected originally by my wife's job which first took us out that way. This group has always gotten along swimmingly, and seeing them brings feelings about the life we left behind (and opposing what I expressed in a very recent post), but I digress. My family flew out to see them this last weekend and the location of our meetup far exceeded my expectations.

When we went to the beach in the past, on the Atlantic Ocean, we saw Ocean City, MD (a place I never wrote about) and a bit of Delaware, namely Rehoboth Beach, favorite vacay spot of our former invalid president. Call us fancy or pretentious but we very much preferred quieter, more upscale Delaware, even if the beach itself was smaller and fairly crowded. One piece of this was the comparison to OCMD, a place I'll just describe as kinda trashy and overflowing with feral teenagers, and the other is my love for Dogfish Head Brewery, in Milton DE, a place where we made an almost annual pilgrimage, but I digress again. We'd never made it to any part of the Jersey Shore, and didn't have much interest considering the reputation. Turns out we were wrong on that account.

I knew for this trip we were going to the beach in Jersey but I didn't know, or look into the details, until right before leaving. We were not, as I had put into my calendar, going to Ocean City NJ, just south of Atlantic City. Our destination was Beach Haven, a little farther north on what's called Long Beach Island. One of our friends has a family house up there and so we didn't need to pay for lodging and all of us would be staying together. It was an ideal setup, even if kids were sleeping in rooms with parents and older kids were on couches etc. If you have little kids you know that often the only time you get to talk about real adult stuff, or play a board game, comes after all the kids are in bed. And that doesn't happen much unless you're all staying in the same house. Getting some of that time with our friends was perhaps the best part of all.

Of course I get stressed prior to traveling, both packing and trying to anticipate what all could go wrong. If it's part of the plan I'll be okay, but I do not enjoy things going sideways. Things went sideways on this adventure. On Thursday night we flew into BWI, about 3 hours from the beach, bc that was the best option for us. The thought was we'd make the drive that night, with the backup being staying with our friends near the airport who'd be leaving in the morning. We landed early, and then sat on the tarmac without a gate. Our luggage took forever to show up. Worst of all, the line, once I reached the rental car facility, was absurdly long and moved at a snail's pace. After losing more than an hour in this process we decided to stay near where we were and get an early start the next morning. We had our friend's garage code, it'd be fine. We did indeed get into their garage, but they'd locked the door to the house since we last told them we weren't coming over. They'd set their phones to Do Not Disturb and both went straight to voicemail. What we had was a failure to communicate. So we could sleep somewhere in the car, find a hotel on the way, or drive three hours starting at nearly midnight. We started driving. My wife did the best she'd ever done staying awake but was out when we passed through Elkton, my previously stated preference for stopping. I pressed on. Let me tell you what, driving in the middle of the night through the Pine Barrens, thick forest tight to the road where we passed a number of deer, was a little freaky. All those red traffic lights on LBI when no one was around almost pushed me over the edge. But we made it, at 3am, found the beds and crashed.

Hopefully this extended preface is more amusing than boring. The rest is actually about where we stayed in New Jersey, a rather cool place.

The next two days were lovely, that really is the purpose of this post. Long Beach Island is a long and narrow barrier island, similar to the geography of Assateague Island but, you know, developed and populated. Have you ever seen what the strips along the east coast (the Jersey Shore, Delaware down to Assateague, the Outer Banks...) actually look like? It's remarkable, and would be terrifying to be there during a hurricane making landfall. Look at this:

There's only one way onto the island, and since we were staying in Beach Haven, actually a little south of that 'town,' it's still a decent drive after getting out there. But being that far down the island was a massive boon to the experience. From the house we only needed to walk a block, cross the street and we were on the beach. The beach was gorgeous, clean, and not at all busy, even on a warm (perfect!) weekend day during the summer. That house had everything we needed, chairs and umbrellas, towels and sand toys, balls to throw and more. That's the beauty of getting to stay with someone who owns this kind of place. Their family doesn't even need to pack clothes, they stock it at the beginning of the summer (I assume) and they can basically just go.

When we needed to eat or wanted to do something other than hang on the sand it was only a few minute drive to Beach Haven. There were a ton of ice cream shops and restaurants, of seafood variety and others, many that seemed quite nice. We heard some of these places are BYOB, a kind of astounding situation. To be honest it all seemed way too chill, though we were told absolutely not to speed and I get that. I also couldn't believe how easy it was to park everywhere we went.

Completely uncrowded, it was so nice

Beach Haven on a sleepy Sunday morning

Places we liked:

Pearl Street Market - deli counter (we had breakfast) and small market, plus cool merch

Bagel Shack - NJ style soft bagels, got them to-go

Locohana Tropical Grill - mostly seafood, counter service and picnic tables, cornhole

Barry's Do Me a Flavor - huge variety of ice cream flavors, with indoor/outdoor seating

Mr. Tee's 36 Hole Mini Golf - fairly simple mini golf courses but worked well for the kids

There's undoubtedly a lot more to checkout, we were only there two days. My wife and I would've eaten more seafood. There was a more involved looking mini golf place and an amusement park. Even just another day on the beach trying not to get torched would've been thoroughly enjoyable. But our timeline was short and activities there were determined by the stamina (and existence) of our children, and that's okay. That's our life right now. We had an tremendous time, would love to go back if that's ever a possibility, and we can't thank our friends enough for inviting us and making it happen. We learned Jersey can be an amazing place, certainly if you're in the right part and have the hook-up.

Nearly time to ring the bell!

It was even worth all the travel stress, I think.