Gym, Tan, Laundry.

Listen, we didn’t choose to spend our evenings here watching the Jersey Shore. It chose us.

We’ll call it cultural immersion. As responsible adults, it didn’t feel right living in New Jersey for two months without doing a little research. Between episodes of 90 Day Fiancé, we’ve been learning about hair spray, bronzer, and boardwalk clubbing. Purely academic.

To be fair, Cape May is about as anti–Jersey Shore as it gets, but we can pretend. 

Our local gym, The North Shore Beach Club, is the closest we’ve come to spending our evenings with Gorilla Juice Heads. The low ceilings, millennial jams, and old school dumbbells make it feel like a basement weight room that’s been operating successfully and without interruption since 1989. We love it there and all of the regulars we’ve befriended since joining.

The “tanning” portion of this experiment has been replaced by a whole lot of snow, ice, and wind. We arrived in Jersey the first week of January and will be leaving the first week of March - just enough time to fully enjoy the off-season. 

We’ve had days with “feels like” temperatures below -11 degrees made possible by wind gusts up to thirty miles per hour. Mornings that are above 37 degrees feel warm and comfortable, which is not something I have ever claimed in my life. 

We’re staying in North Cape May on the Delaware Bay side, within walking distance of the beach. Scruff and I try to make it out to the shore just after sunrise each morning, and we’re usually right on time to hear the Cape May Lewes Ferry sound its horn at 7:00am. Our normal morning routine involves immediately pooping next to our neighbor’s mailbox (Scruff, to be clear), then we walk down the middle of the road to the first entrance to the bay. The sidewalks have been regularly iced over, and since our neighborhood is sleepy and quiet, we rarely meet a car on our journey.

Once we hit the sand, we spend the remainder of our walk dodging horseshoe crabs, stalking seagulls, and searching for the most offensive smelling thing to investigate. Orphaned horseshoe crab tails are Scruff’s current favorite.

Some mornings the sand stretches wide and flat at low tide, the bay pulled back so far it feels like we’ve discovered something private. As the tides come and go with the severe weather, the icebergs beach themselves in new formations, creating a different landscape every day.

Scruff turned one on January 16th and got his nuts removed shortly before (sorry, bud). I think it’s safe to say he’s exactly the same and has just as much energy, but he’s also the best daytime napper we’ve ever met. He’s the worst laundry helper - constantly stealing and mixing all of my clean and dirty socks, spreading them throughout the house, and hiding them in couch cushions. I will leave New Jersey with far fewer appropriately paired socks than I started with.

Ross left for a ski trip to Breckenridge with his buddies the first week of February, and Scruff and I spent our evenings staring at each other wondering what the heck we were supposed to do with ourselves. Scruff spent every morning and every evening double and triple checking every bedroom just to make sure he hadn’t missed Ross hiding somewhere under the covers (a frequent game they play). I refused to watch any trash TV without him. We learned that life just isn’t as fun without your best friend to share it with.

Outside of our academic studies of early 2000s New Jersey pop culture, we’ve settled into the quieter parts of Cape May life. We found a local bread shed that sells sourdough and cinnamon rolls on the weekends. We’re officially locals at Uncle Bill’s Pancake House in North Cape May, and El Pueblo Taqueria down the street. We’ve ripped the legs off of lobsters and choked down oysters. We even had an entertaining experience with a local HVAC employee when he accidentally flooded our Airbnb’s crawlspace after breaking a city water pipe.

Our favorite weekend started at the arcade, where we took full advantage of a suspiciously generous skee-ball machine producing far too many tickets. We finished the weekend with a trip to the Cape May Zoo, and closed out the night with a very sticky rice crispy treat-making session with the boys. We miss them already.

When we’re not busy thwarting skee-ball machines, we’re finishing our evenings back at the bay as the sun starts to drop. The sunsets here are absolutely stunning - pictures don’t do it justice. Just like every place we visit, we feel like we’ve been here just long enough to understand the culture and call ourselves locals, but not so long that we’ve grown comfortable. 

Above all, I’m most impressed by our uncanny ability to unintentionally rack up more toll fees than any normal human should in a two month period. Call us naïve. Call us blind. Or maybe it’s a highly coordinated regional conspiracy. Either way, the EZ Pass statements have been humbling.

We love it here and we’ll definitely be back. With an EZ Pass.

Gym, Tan, See Yous soon, Jersey. 

<3 Taylor