I'm Baaaaaack!

Did you guys miss me?

Three weeks ago we packed the Wy family truckster and headed south. Destination? Long Beach Island. Surf City to be exact. It's the perfect vacation spot on the Jersey shore. Everything is walkable, the beach is only a block away, and it's totally low-key and family friendly.

Unlike say, Seaside, where the main attraction is wall-to-wall Jersey Shore goombahs preening for a bevy of tackily tattooed big hair bimbettes as the beer flows faster than the tanning lotion.

LBI doesn't do rowdy. And that's how we like it. Which isn't to say there wasn't some mighty fine, uh, scenery. When the ice cream man rang his bell the moms went a-runnin'.

There was only one glitch. This year the house we rented didn't come with Wi-Fi. No problemo, right? Just borrow a Verizon 3G/4G mobile hotspot from the office and we're good to go. And we did go. Slowly. The Verizon network on LBI isn't up to the task of handling 2 laptops and an iPod on a gizmo that's supposed to serve a total of five wireless devices. Dropouts and resets were the rule, not the exception. And that's when the thing bothered to connect at all.

Fortunately the public library was right down the street. Free Wi-Fi. Which even worked like gangbusters while I was sitting outside on a convenient bench long after the library had closed for the day.

So, did Nadz keep you entertained? Yeah I saw some of the negative comments and frankly I'm disappointed. Sure he's kind of a liberal, but he's a thinking kind of liberal; a guy who is the exact opposite of knee-jerk limousine liberalism. I thought he'd spark some good dialog, but aside from a noble effort by the Mind Numbed Robot (thanks 'Bot!) there weren't any bites.

But hey, I said it was an experiment, and the beauty of actually performing experiments lies in discovering unanticipated results. And of course in not trying to fudge those results by massaging the data to hide the decline in readership…

You know what brings back the RSS subscribers? Rule 5! Here's another of the beach moms chasing the ice cream man.

Now if I was of the entrepreneurial bent, and I wanted to attract the hot beach mom crowd, I'd skip the ice cream and go straight into the frozen marguerita business. I'm pretty sure I could make a killing, at least until Five-O showed up. After all this is New Jersey. If there isn't already a rule against selling frozen margueritas to hot moms on the beach, there will be one, probably before the batteries on my blender run out.

On the beach there's a rule for everything. After you buy your badge ($7 per day, $17 for the week, or $35 for the whole season) you're given an itemized list of the stuff you cannot do. No ball playing. No digging holes more than 12 inches deep. No open flames. No kite flying. No volleyball (shouldn't that be covered by "no ball playing?") No food (although just about every take out joint in town advertises they'll deliver to the beach so that's one rule which seems to be inoperative). And of course, no alcohol.

See? I told you there was a rule against the exploitation of hot moms in search of frozen refreshment. Maybe I'll call Chris Christie and ask him to do something about that.

I know you're dying to see a picture of our luxurious accomodations. And let me tell you, this place had (almost) all of the comforts of home. Here's the view from the deck.

Sadly, their Sears catalog was woefully out of date.

Posted at 19:28 by Chris Wysocki   [/misc]   Comments | Perm Link |
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