Jersey Shore
We head from New York City to the Jersey Shore, stopping at the old Keansburg Amusement Park before lunch on the coast at Rooney’s Oceanfront Restaurant in Long Branch, and a short drive through Ocean County Park in Lakewood.
Dad and I left New York, crossing Manhattan to take the Holland Tunnel back to New Jersey. This time we headed south for the Jersey Shore. We endured I-95 in bored silence, then crossed the Raritan River at Perth Amboy, the northernmost of about 40 towns that comprise the Shore.
Keansburg Amusement Park
We pulled off Highway 36 briefly to drive past the Keansburg Amusement Park at the western end of Sandy Hook Bay. The park opened in 1904 and features typical boardwalk attractions like bumper cars and all manner of spinny-swingy rides, but it did not appear to be open on this warm Tuesday morning. Across the street, the much newer Runaway Rapids water park had a couple dozen customers.We soon crossed the Sandy Hook bridge and turned south again on Ocean Avenue through Sea Bright, a city spread thinly down a peninsula barrier separating the Atlantic Ocean from Shrewsbury Bay and the wide Navasingk River.
Rooney's Oceanfront Restaurant
Continuing down Ocean Avenue, we reached the beach resort town of Long Branch, which has the distinction of having been visited by seven U.S. presidents: Chester A. Arthur, James A. Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, and Woodrow Wilson. While that list is impressive, it also implies that no president in more than 100 years has found Long Branch worth visiting. Hey, we liked it!Dad and I pulled up for lunch at Rooney’s Oceanfront Restaurant, an airy dining spot with a covered atrium and an outdoor patio looking out onto the beach.
I had the lobster roll, and Dad had the fried flounder sandwich. We left glad that we had visited Long Branch, even if a century of American presidents had considered it not worthy of their company.
After more time along the coast, we turned inland toward Lakewood. When Dad and I do these trips, I keep a dashcam running in the car to record video of both our view of the road and our conversations in the car. As we approached Lakewood, the dashcam beeped to let us know its memory card was full. I pulled over into an empty dirt lot and fished another card from my backpack.
I turned the dashcam on its side and pressed down on the little spring-loaded slot to release the old card. The tiny memory card — the size of a fingernail — did not just release but went airborne, popping a few inches in the air, then down the side of my car seat before coming to rest directly under the center console.
If I had been a cartoon character, my frozen look of horror would have cracked in a dozen places, then a hundred, before crumbling to dust. More than a week of memories now lay in an apparently inaccessible spot in the middle of our Jeep. I tried every angle of approach to find it, but it was all very tight and awkward. We debated finding a mechanic or Jeep dealer to do some work to help remove the console temporarily. But that seemed expensive and time-consuming, and probably not expressly allowed in the rental contract. We needed to get back on the road the next morning. I was resigned to our loss.
Lakewood
We moved on — physically, at least. With my own personal cloud of gloom over my head, Dad and I got back on the road and reached Ocean County Park in Lakewood. The township of Lakewood has about 135,000 residents — a remarkable 46 percent increase over 2010 — making it the fifth largest town by population in the Garden State. Lakewood is home to the largest yeshiva (Orthodox Jewish school) outside of Israel: Beth Medrash Govoha, a Haredi Jewish Lithuanian yeshiva with about 6,700 students. More than half of Lakewood’s residents are Orthodox Jews.Ocean County Park is the former site of John D. Rockefeller’s vacation residence. The financier imported white pine, hemlock, and other trees — now mature — from all over the country to his estate. The park includes softball fields, a swimming lake, tennis and pickleball courts, and an 18-hole disc golf course. We cruised slowly through the woods, releasing a bit of the tension in the welcome shade.
We drove to our hotel in nearby Toms River, whose team won the Little League World Series title in 1998 against Japan. While Dad settled in for a nap — a process that can take as long as 10 seconds — I went back out to the car to see if anything could be done about the lost memory card. I opened the back door and reached under the seat, shoving my arm as far as it could go toward the center console. My legs dangled gracefully out the back door in the hotel parking lot as I strained. I could feel the metal console, but the card had slid further, down into a well. Streeeetch.
Minutes later, I brushed across a small piece of plastic. I carefully gave a final stretch to get a finger around it, then dragged it slowly out of the well and into my sight. It was the lost card. A flood of relief, and another successful comeback for the visitors.