There Is No Cat

I thought it was supposed to be shoe shops

We got back Sunday from our annual tour of the shirt shops of quaint, Victorian Jersey Shore resort town Cape May. It was a nice trip, courtesy of Laura’s brother, who gave us the trip as a Christmas present since we always go down with Laura’s parents this weekend. We all stayed at a lovely bed-and-breakfast about five blocks from the boardwalk in Cape May. We had a suite with Laura’s parents. We got the room with the twin beds, which aren’t nearly as wide as they look in the pictures on the web site. Friday night we took Laura’s mom out for Mothers’ Day to her favorite restaurant, the Lobster House. You always have to get there early, because it’s one of the most popular restaurants in town. We may have gotten there a little too early this year, though; there was a line outside the restaurant when we got there, waiting for them to open at 5 pm. No problem, the line moved quickly and we were seated with no real delay. I’m always the landlubber at this restaurant, since I don’t eat seafood. At least this year the waitress didn’t mention this little fact like the one last year and the year before. After dinner, we went out to Sunset Beach, but the sky was too overcast for a decent sunset. You need some clouds, but too many spoils it. Oh well. At least they had a shirt shop. Laura’s mom pointed out that the water looked particularly nice even though the sky didn’t, and that was true. I wasn’t sure the camera would capture the subtlety of the colors, but it did a reasonably good job. If you want to see some really spectacular photos from Sunset Beach, you can look at the ones I took last October when Laura and I visited.

Saturday morning it rained cats and dogs, but after breakfast at the B&B (eggs cooked in a hole cut in a big piece of bread with Havarti cheese on top, mmmm), we went for a drive up the coast a little to Wildwood, Stone Harbor, and Avalon anyway. Stone Harbor has a lot of shirt shops too, many of the same ones they have in Cape May, except the shirts say "Stone Harbor" rather than "Cape May" on them. By the time we got back to Cape May, it had stopped raining, so we went to the Mall and got some lunch and looked at some more shirt shops. We usually eat at the Lobster House on the second day to celebrate Laura’s mom’s birthday, but this year we planned to go instead to Godmother’s, an excellent Italian restaurant that Laura and I had gone to when we were down in Wildwood and Cape May last October. We thought the food was excellent, and Laura’s parents seemed to enjoy it too. After dinner, we went down to Sunset Beach again, and tonight the view was better. There was a freaking huge cumulo-nimbus cloud in the foreground that never caught the sun on its underside, but behind it, the sky was spectacular. But since we hadn’t expected to come out to the beach, I didn’t have my cameras with me, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

Sunday morning we had breakfast at the B&B (waffles!) then checked out and said our goodbyes to Laura’s parents. Since we were leaving, the weather decided to get nice again, so we walked the five blocks to the boardwalk, where we ran into Laura’s parents, who were at Morrow’s Nut House buying some fudge for Laura’s brother and sister-in-law to thank them for the trip. So we got to say goodbye to them all over again. (Amazing! Morrow’s doesn’t have it’s own web site....) Then we walked up to the Mall and looked at some of the shops that don’t sell shirts (okay, we stopped in one and Laura bought some skirts).

On the way home, we stopped for an hour in Wildwood, which we had missed the day before because of the rain. I had a hankering for a Lime Ricky, and Wildwood is the only place I know where I can get one. There’s an Italian deli right near us that sells Raspberry Lime Rickys, and Nagle’s in Ocean Grove sells Cherry Lime Rickys, but there’s no lime in those so-called Lime Rickys, where there is in the Lime Rickys you get in Wildwood. Laura and I also split a funnel cake. It was the first time I’d ever had one. It’s basically dough being used as a delivery platform for grease and sugar, a vile concoction if ever there was one. Actually, it tasted pretty good the first time. It was just the repeats over the next three hours that turned me off to them. We continued up the shore for a while, stopping for lunch at a diner in Ocean City that also has no web site.

Posted at 11:21 AM