Jack Riepe, Piss Clams And The Jersey Shore

Even I in my cultural cave have heard of the Jersey Shore. Permit me to astonish you, I rode my Vespa through here in May 1981 on my way to Key West, though I remember not very much of the place, nor do I have pictures to prove it. My awareness these days of the delights of the Garden State is gleaned mostly from watching HBOs The Sopranos, thus I can confidently say New Jersey is a mystery to me. However looking out across the acres of parking lots while enjoying the preposterous 25 mph speed limit on Central Avenue in Seaside Park, a crushingly slow speed heavily enforced, I did manage to figure out that as a vacation destination Key West does look miraculously suave and exotic by comparison.

People apparently hole up in these apartments and enjoy the massive sandy beach next door while admiring their rides. I am not a car aficionado but I always please readers when I photograph something like this so I did:

The purpose of this excursion from the gruesome Garden State Parkway and it's infantile 65mph speed limit roundly ignored by all was to have lunch. Jack Riepe instructed us to meet him here, so we did, like contract killers for the CIA. I naturally managed to get completely turned around so when my wife went ahead while I walked Cheyenne I marched confidently into the fish market. Clearly not a restaurant so I tried again. There was a nice lady bartender in the downstairs bar and she redirected me to the large sign that indicated the restaurant was upstairs, where it had been lurking all the time.

The young waitress managed Riepe masterfully entering into his Jersey conspiracy with the big smile of a waitress bored by the sincerity and puzzlement of ordinary patrons who were just looking for food.

Jack Riepe of Twisted Roads fame wanted to introduce us to the delights of New Jersey seafood, much of which we've never heard of before, never mind eaten. Crab cakes? Sure we know those, and these were good of course, but here we were on familiar ground. I loved the decor of the Berkely Seafood Restaurant...

...and ladies that lunch showed up too which completed my delight at the place.

Jack ordered oysters which my wife enjoyed though I am reluctant to eat live raw animals. Cover them in spinach and cheese and grill them, and I'm in. Raw they look like, and taste like snot.

Then came the appetizer we had been waiting for, piss clams nectar of the Gods we are told. I nearly had some at DJs on Duval once, Key West Diary: Clams And Cronuts but I didn't and failed to realise what I was missing. The salesman at DJs was no good at all. A clam's a clam, right? Think again and try these things.

Jack instructed us in the fine art of removing the cover, dunking the steamed clam in the broth to remove impurities then dunking it in molten butter to ...add fat/enhance the flavor. I followed suit.

Oddly enough they were delicious and I will look forward to some on Duval and seeing if they match the real thing which I now have experienced. Then we tried something called basa fish which is reputedly popular in New Jersey and Vietnam? Aren't I surprised there is controversy surrounding this fish and how it's raised and so forth. It's an odd creature and I'm not sure I'd eat it again, but we enjoyed it. It has a strange jelly like consistency, not flakey and a milky mild taste. Supposedly it is of the catfish family and that makes sense in retrospect. I love trying new foods!

Jack ordered soft shell crab and we tried it. It's crab, fair enough, and tasted good even if it was fiddly to eat. I'd try this again for sure. Looks odd though.

Our waitress was a delight all the way through. Nice woman and a great server, with a fine sense of humor, needed when Jack is employing his battered bay seal look (copyright reserved).

I took a few shots of Jack as he kept us in stitches with his stories of love gained and lost and the ten dollar tip to the manager of London's swankiest hotel for discreet services rendered. Then I figured these pictures record the maestro at work. Priceless.

We stumbled out into the sunlight, me having refused chocolate pudding on the grounds, reasonable I thought, of feeling stuffed. The lovely Jersey Shore, from upstairs.

Cheyenne enjoying the cool sea breeze chose to ignore the old seducer. Good girl.

It was lovely seeing you Jack, thanks for the food and the laughs.

Order his book and you will have an idea of how delightful our lunch really was. It's selling like Jersey Shore crab cakes, and it's twice as good. Conversations With a Motorcycle by Jack Riepe | McNally Jackson Books

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Sailing The Mason Dixon Line

I grant you there is something romantic about taking a break from driving by riding a boat and yet despite being stationary still making progress toward your destination. There is however nothing romantic about being jangled awake at four in the morning by your alarm clock which is reminding you the ferry is three and a half hours away and you have to confirm your arrival by 8:15 for the sailing a half hour later. Cheyenne was puzzled to be out walking in the darkness but did her best and filled a plastic bag for me.

She took her place in the Ford, on the princess bench in the back, while we loaded the trunk. To my astonishment we left on time at 4:32 am and found ourselves on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel which looks like a misspelling but is in fact an endless chain of bridges and tunnels, one after the other, Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel Homepage.

Of course at that hour of the morning, by now close to five they were busy making repairs before the commute clogged stuff up so we got clogged instead. Which started my wife fretting about the time. We had promised Phillip and Van the joy of our company in Boston Monday night for dinner and that appointment overshadowed the rest of the day.

The sunrise was extraordinary, the usual pink and orange hues in the sky, but the ground was still in darkness so the the contours of the land, and the huge mysteriously dark trees gave the approach of day a mysterious quality that I don't get in the Keys where everything is so flat and the trees are so small that nothing is hidden.

And the ground fog, that was something.

The temperature was in the mid sixties and the night had produced a veil of white mist so insubstantial it vanished as we approached at sixty miles an hour but from a distance it looked as solid as a brick wall.

All too soon the night became day, cars peeled out of driveways and we were in traffic again. Apparently Delaware is a no helmet law state which makes it rare among the rigid societies of the Northeast. He was riding and I wasn't. Grr.

The thing about lining up for ferries when you have a dog, and I've done this a few times now, is that you have to take your dog for a walk as you wait and she has to take a last minute shit under the unwavering gaze of hundreds of otherwise bored passengers. I was hoping that her early morning walk back at the hotel might have done the trick, but from her ample recesses she managed to locate one more giant effort. So there I was like an unwilling participant in some minor modern one act play stooping and scraping with my confounded plastic bag wishing a fight might break out or some other distraction might attract the audience's rapt attention.

All this for 47 bucks.

On board as Cheyenne and I maneuvered to the stairs I noticed a rather clever trick, obvious when you think about it for hauling bicycles.

Labradors and other minor dogs are only allowed on the outside deck which must be a trial in January but in summer it was delightful.

Cheyenne liked the steel decking and sat close to watch the world go by from the safety of my aura. Good dog.

We wandered around a bit though she was not impressed by the amount of water outside the boat and proceeded to ignore it for the rest of the 90 minute trip. A very pleasant couple with a small dog sat next to us and engaged in canine conversation (curses, I thought at first, Cheyenne you will pay for this intrusion!) but they turned out to be very cheerful Floridians living in Pittsburg to deal with family matters. Cheyenne was forgiven and we passed a pleasant thirty minutes.

I guess the Cape May - Lewes Ferry is quite a public service and cultural institution. Who knew?

Then I went hunting for the loo and unhappily things took a rather dark turn. I couldn't find any sign of a toilet anywhere and was ready to take a discreet leak in One of several life jacket lockers, which in my defense looked remarkably like porta potties, but I was saved at the last minute when I stumbled across the blessed room. Hmm, I said to myself, I'm surprised they don't have urinals, perhaps to allow for rough crossings in winter weather but I've never seen that on any boat. I took a stall and amused myself by photographing the sign. On my boat I used to tell guests that you could only put something in the bowl after you'd eaten it which produced some grimaces on the guests' appalled faces until the penny dropped.

After the inside of the stall lost its charm I went to wash my hands as one does, rinse, hum-de-dum, soap, old macdonald had a farm, hum-de-dum, rinse, hum-de-dum, paper...ooh, silly woman what are you doing in here? I thought and she did too as she made a rapid u-turn and left looking embarrassed as well she might. Second paper towel, hum-de-dum, whereupon a second woman appeared. This time, ominously, from a stall. Bugger I said, faced with the two to one evidence against me, maybe I got it wrong. She started laughing and agreed. I'm from Key West I said, I'm actually transitioning, and the beard's the next to go. If the other woman who looked like she was having a heart attack ever reads this I can only offer heartfelt apologies. The mistake was all mine, but I didn't wet the seat, I promise.

I went outside and tried to blend in among the other bearded sex change candidates.

To compensate for the stress my wife went and got the world's largest pretzel from the cafeteria. It tasted like bread dough with large grains of salt but everyone else seemed to like theirs and even Cheyenne pronounced it passable.

After all that we retreated to the car, but first we had to disentangle Cheyenne from the staircase where she discovered a discarded pretzel in a completely inaccessible spot between the steps. Bloody dog, she never misses a scrap and that sudden halt nearly launched me into orbit on the vertical staircase. The Garden State Parkway attended us as our next stop was Tom's River where Riepe awaited us for lunch.

I am not in the habit of giving advice but let me say this, signposting is sketchy in New Jersey, speed limits are mere suggestions and everyone ignores them completely, and if you don't arrive with a supply of quarters for exact change you end up in interminable lines for the change booth (EzyPass is not compatible with the Sunpass -barbarians!). But the drive through New Jersey was a whole other adventure. That we had arrived was sufficient for the moment.

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Fire Adapted Dog and Illicit Lumber

When on the road with wife and dog I am tempted to envy those among us who get to ride motorcycles. At the same time 1800ccs of raw power, a cup of cola and a backwards baseball cap aren't quite my style... In Fort Myers where I photographed him he was run-of-the-mill.

We decided that if this trip was going to be memorable we were going to friend-hop so Ft Myers we saw Jeffrey and Jessica again over Indian food. Great. But ending day two saw us still in Florida. Unheard of! We usually cover huge miles to get out of Flatistan. Not this time. Our next friend is Jack Riepe of Twisted Roads fame, for lunch Monday in New Jersey and that rendezvous was going to require some serious I-95 mile mashing. Poor Cheyenne finds riding the back seat, even turned into a broad couch, to be rather tedious as she can't see out very easily. However she is patient and is rewarded with walks all day long. Some of the Interstate rest areas outside Florida are quite wild...

We got to Florence, South Carolina arounf 2:45pm which was lucky as the Long Grain Café closes at three on Sundays and we slid into our booth in time to order lunch.

Layne found this place her usual way, hunting through her restaurant apps while I drove. There were cops everywhere on the freeway and they were pulling people over like high school monitors in the hallway. Still people galloped and I tucked in behind the big pick up trucks in my low profile Fusion sedan. So far I haven't got pulled over. Nice.

The Long Grain Cafe got tons of positive reviews for its southern food though the place looked intriguingly like a converted Chinese restaurant.

My wife hot grilled chicken, full of flavor and not even slightly dry accompanied by some peculiar but delicious broccoli pancakes which were delicious mixing two delicious yet apparently incompatible flavors. The mac and cheese baked in a dish was okay but nothing like a maccheroni dish I would expect to be served.

My grilled pork chop was delicious, thin and covered in a savory gravy. Of course I got long grain rice, collard greens and the oddest small red beans packed with flavor. A great dish.

Our lunch including the endless iced tea, sweetened of course, normally a forbidden sugar drink for us, yet delicious was $18. Outside we saw a woman packing her SUV with food. I think she was the chef because I didn't notice a to go purchase during lunch. I wanted to congratulate her for lunch but I was shy.

We drive through parts of Florence that were landscaped, filled with trees and shady avenues...and we left by a different route, thanks to the phone GPS that sent us through a more well worn neighborhood. I was racing to get to the restaurant before it closed so I got no pictures but I did get photos on the way out.

Some Main Street or other! Buggered if I know what. My wife was checking the signs as we aimed for the freeway and as we passed a billboard she said out loud with a deep note of puzzlement "Fire...Adapted...Dog...?" No silly, as we passed the second such:

FireAdapted.Org some sort of wildfire prevention program. Then we passed a construction yard, "Illicit Lumber? " she queried. I think she was in some sort of collard coma as there was nothing actually illicit about Elliott Lumber. Florence was getting a bad rap from my comatose wife. We left.

On the way to the freeway entrance we saw a hub cap store. Talk about enterprising!

Soon enough we passed the South of the Border nonsense just south of the north Carolina stateline, and as seemed to be happening too much so far on this trip we had to press on, no stopping. I will, one day visit South Of The Border ~ America’s Favorite Highway Oasis and enjoy the kitsch.

Our goal was La Quinta in Norfolk, Virginia and we had hours of tedious driving, eighty miles per hour in stretches varying between 65 and 70 mph. There were no cops on this stretch but I stuck to hiding behind the speed demons in the SUVs watching like a hawk when the way ahead was clear. In the Spring when I got stopped for 70 in a 55 in the Outer Banks I got plenty of ear ache from my wife. Not this time. I've been pulled over in Panama, Croatia, Grand Cayman and Bosnia on various vacations so Herself has come to expect it. Not this time I insist.

Of course when we arrived at the hotel we were stuck behind people who never heard of booking in advance and the sole clerk had to cope with their particulars and foibles before doing our instant check in.

And so to bed. What a tedious way to travel! Making miles....Tuesday will be much better, destination Boston.

 

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