My Big Fat Jersey Vacation

  See what I did there?  I took the name of a popular movie from several years ago and changed it to fit the subject of my entry.  You should have to pay for that kind of cleverness.  And I just give it away!

Part 1- The Conditions:

First of all, my wife forgot to take the first Saturday off so she had to work before we could leave.  It was okay, since I got to go into work and make myself look good.  I'm sure my boss and co-workers noticed how dedicated I was to the company to come in to work even on my vacation. 

  The trip from upstate NY to midstate NJ took 5 and a half hours.  But with Sirius, you never lose the signal.  The VCH loves Sirius.

  Sunday morning I was the first person awake.  I would go on to be the first one up every day for the whole vacation.  A record that may never be broken.  Usually it's a silent battle between me and my dad, but he has a new job and couldn't come this year, so I got all the glory of being the one who opens the blinds.  My plan was to go to bed really late and get up really early, theoretically making the vacation last longer.  Sleep is for the weak- I view it as a complete waste of time.  Especially on vacation!

  I should mention my toe.  Way back in 2000, right before Kasey was born, I dropped a wooden pallet on my big toe and ripped the nail right off.  It has never been quite the same sicne it grew back- periodically, it will turn sort of greenish and fall off.  Well, mowing the lawn one last time before we left, I smacked the hell out of that toe and it became a nagging injury for the whole two weeks.  It seems that four-year-olds have a keen sense of which toe to accidentally step on.  I also got to gross out my sister because there is a bruise underneath and the nail is clearly dead but waiting patiently to fall off.  My brother took a picture of it for posterity.

  Anyway, the weather during the first week was perfect.  You could sweat your butt off just sitting on the beach and then go into the ocean to cool off.  If anything, it was TOO hot.  But that's the way we likeit.  No one wants it cold and rainy on their vacation.  The ocean temperature was good, but one day there was way too much seaweed and most of the other days there were an awful lot of fish eggs or something.  You couldn't run your hand through the water without feeling little rubbery things hitting you.  I don't even want to know how many of them I swallowed while riding or dodging waves.

  The second week was not as good, but still decent enough.  It was a little cloudier and on the last day we had to leave the beach because it started pouring.

PART 2- Activities   

  I originally wanted to write this as a day by day account, but  I didn't keep a journal and the days just seem to blend together after a while.  I am therefore going to list random things I remember in no particular order.  I will leave a lot out and anyone who was there can feel free to add stuff in the comments section.

  1) The first thing I remember is that my string of awesome Mexican Train domination came to an end.  Turns out the game really is mostly luck and I am not the master of the game I thought I was becoming.  The first time we played I won six rounds in a row and thought I was well on my way to a fifth consecutive victory but blew it in the latter stages of the game.  At one point, I was the only person who hadn't won a game, which included my sister's boyfriend who was only there on the weekends.  We played almost every night, because it takes a long time and is a good way to stay up late without getting into trouble, and I only won once.

2) The vacation must-list also includes miniature golf.  The first time, my mother started off with all twos.  I think she had a 12 after 6 holes or something.  So I kept track of the stroke difference between the two of us for the whole game and by the 18th hole my mom had blown it and I knew that I had clinched victory.  Then we added up the scores and I had only beaten my wife, Keri, by two strokes. 

  In case you can't tell, I am an arrogant bastard when it comes to competitions of any kind.  I remember years ago enraging my sister by declaring myself the King of Golf, as if that's a real title.  Anyway, for all my talent and perfectly legitimate excuses for missing putts, it is actually my wife who is secretly, quietly a very good mini-golfer.  The second time we played, it was just me, her and my sister and Erin and I got our asses handed to us.  It was not even close!  Keri played well, but I can't overlook the fact that it was a different, unfamiliar course for me the second time and I was forced to carry the scorecard and pencil in pockets that were not loose enough for such things. 

  The other thing about mini-golf is, and even my wife admits this, I am really good at winning free games.  You know, the 18th hole where you win a free game with a hole in one- in the last two years, I have done it more often than not in several different places.  Needless to say, we never made it back to that second place where I won a free game and I have to carry a little blue ticket in my wallet for a whole year now.

3) We don't just play the Mexican Train Game.  We also play other stuff, like Sorry!  The fun thing we like to do with Sorry! is play "Amazing Race" style, where the last player to check in is eliminated.  The first game, you play until three people get home, then two in the second and the third game is a one on one game.  We play that so much that the cards have become battered and sometimes you know what you're going to draw before you turn it over. 

  We also played some Battleship, which my wife also usually beats me at.  I usually have a sound precise strategy and she beats me with luck before the strategy can play itself out.  Grrr!

  Then there's the game that has reached legendary status in my family.  We call it the Category Game, but I don't really know if it has a real name or not.  Basically, you take a piece of paper and make a grid.  Then you assign categories and letters along the top and left side.  Then everyone runs off to fill the boxes in- if the top left box had A over it and Movies next to it, an appropriate answer to write in the box would be Armageddon and so on.  When the time limit is up, everyone compares answers at a roundtable discussion and you get one point for every answer that no one else has.  My quick thinking and fabulously large brain usually propel me to victory, though not as often as you would think.  After all, I am playing opponents within the same gene pool usually.

  This game has reached legendary status over the years, mostly through the humor it creates.  My brother and his new wife are so perfect for each other that they tend to cancel each other's answers in the most unexpected ways.  This year, under Athletes-T, they both had Marques Tuiasosopo, back up QB of the Oakland Raiders.  Pretty weird, yet not as weird as a few years ago when they both had Things that Smell- O - ostrich poop.  This game is not successful unless we all crack up at least once.

  We also have to argue over something at least once as well.  Things like whether shorts and cut-offs are the same thing.  This year it was whether or not cookies should count as candy.  I said no, but my brother's love of cheating and also finding humor in being combative (He once infuriated my cousin by insisting that The Ref is not a funny movie, even though he had never seen it) kept the argument going longer than it should have.

4) My campaign to find someone to talk to about wrestling was successful.  Even though my cousin isn't watching it currently, I knew that at one time he was equally obsessed or even MORE obsessed with it than I was.  So obviously, it didn't take too much prodding before we were ranking the 128 greatest wrestlers of all time and seeding them into a dream tournament.  That took about 4 days all told.  The winner of the tournament was  Stone Cold Steve Austin.  He beat Hulk Hogan in a close call.  We felt that while Hogan had been a top draw for longer, Austin was tougher and had a little more wrestling skill. Complete details of the tournament results are available upon request.

I had Sean so back into wrestling by the end of the second week that we spent our last night watching a tape of a recent pay-per-view that he went out and bought just so we had something to watch.  And if you think that's sad, well you don't know who you're dealing with.  The night before I got married, we drove all over town looking for video stores that carried old wrestling tapes and spent the night watching Royal Rumbles 1993 and 94.

5) I took a day or two to read something by Dean Koontz.  It was terrible.  Maybe it's because I write myself and subconsciously hate others more successful than I am, but I found myself bored by the whole thing and laughing at some of the sentences.  I've decided that Koontz can't open a chapter without slipping in some attempt at a wildly poetic metaphor that doesn't fit the mood of the book overall.  Maybe it was just that one book because I've heard Koontz is good.

Well, this entry is taking all day so I'm going to stop for now.  Perhaps there will be a part 2, but I don't know yet.  :)

Part 3- The Restaurants     

  The one thing you never do on vacation is cook, so we ended up going to a lot of different places to eat.  This is so important that my wife even tried to rank the places we ate one night.  I will at least try to REMEMBER all the places we ate, but I don't think I can rank them.  I'll try grading them instead.

  McDonald's on the trip there:  F

 Lavalette Pizza (first trip): I had pizza, which was pretty good.  NJ is one of those places that know how to make pizza better than other places.  B+

  My cousin's house for hamburgers: My female cousins are going through this amusing anti-meat kick and decided to make turkey burgers instead of beef ones.  Of course, for people like me who don't try new things, they had to go get some regular ones.  Ordinary burger, but the potato rolls were good.  B+ 

  My other cousin's house for local fried chicken and ribs from some delivery place:  A meal consisting of fried chicken and ribs sounded like proof of God to me, so I was really looking forward to this meal.  And it didn't disappoint.  The ribs were some of the best I had ever had and the fried chicken's skin was great, which of course is really the only thing you can judge fried chicken on.  A+

  Lavalatte Pizza (trip #2)   Easily the worst dining experience I have ever had.  And oddly enough, my food was great.  But the service killed it.  This place is a local pizzeria with sit down service that was across the street from us and it took almost THREE hours.  Half hour to get a table.  Twenty minutes for drink orders.  Another twenty or so to get appetizers.  My brother's food came out fifteen minutes before everyone else's.  They forgot about my sister-in-law's.  My wife's plate was dropped on its way out and then was sent back anyway for being too watery.  And we weren't the only ones with problems.  The manager was running around the restaurant trying to do damage control for just about every customer.  THREE hours at a pizzeria!  D

  Applebee's:   I don't know why Applebee's, a chain, would be any different than the five or so we have here, but it was.  It was worse and I don't think we had the same waitress twice, which was weird.  C

  Joshua Huddy's (formerly The Ground Round): The GR went bankrupt but sold a lot of their restaurants to franchisers who were allowed to keep the menu, but change the name if they wanted to.  So Huddy's is essentially the exact same thing as GR.  And it was good.  A nice, pleasant, unmemorable experience which is what I want from my casual family dining.  B

  Sis-in-law's quesadillas: There was one person who actually wanted to cook in 100 degree heat and unbearable humidity and I actually went ahead and tried it when she did.  I am not declaring quesadillas my new god, but I like chicken and cheese so I wasn't surprised that I liked this.  B

  Tiffany's:  Fuddrucker's is a place that claims to have the World's Greatest Hamburgers.  They weren't all that special to me, but I we don't have that restaurant by us so we always have to go there on vacation.  Until this year when we discovered to our horror, that it had been converted to Tiffany's.  Angry and bitter, we were reluctant to give the place a shot.  But eventually when you don't want to cook at all, you run out of places to go and we had to try it.  And it was freaking AWESOME.  Turns out, it's a small chain co-owned by former football player, current sideline reporter, big Tony Siragusa.  The guy weighs a ton so he must know what he's talking about when it comes to food.  The menu even had little football helmets next to "Tony's favorites".  It was a little expensive, but the ribs, which were apparently award-winning, were the BEST any of us had ever had.  Here's hoping that Tiffany's becomes a larger chain and takes off.  I'm sorry I judged you so harshly for taking away Fuddruckers.  A+

  Olive Garden:   Another place that is good, but not extraordinary.  The only thing noteable about this trip was the lady complaining to the manager that the waitress gave her her change in the form of 48 pennies and the fact that there were five of us and they sat us down in one of the special party of twelve rooms at a giant table we only filled half of.  It was weird.  B-

  White Castle:  Everyone did not think I was serious when I said that getting White Castle was what I was looking forward to the most about vacation.  By the time I was done whining about it over two weeks, I think they at least believed me.  I was finally able to secure a spot for my beloved little burgers as part of the meal at Kasey's early b-day party.  (We have a party for everyone who is not going to drive all the way to us on her real b-day.)  Everyone scoffed at me for wanting them, but by the time lunch was over the next day, there were only 8 burgers left out of 60.  Only 20 of which were consumed by me, so where did the other 40 go?  Must have been into the bellies of everyone else who "hates" WC.  My wife and I found it amusing that my suddenly health-conscious, turkey burger eating cousin even had some.  A+++  White Castle, I dream of you and wake up happy.