#long beach island nj

The rest of the Long Beach Island NJ trip pics (sequel to yesterday’s post). 

Top: my friend  Bill’s great shot of the Barnegat Lighthouse.  Love the sun illuminating the top like that.

Sunset on the second day – more delicate, more varied.  Just as pretty. (The other days it was overcast, no sunsets; and the last day was the sunset at the lighthouse.)

Perfect beach-walking at low tide, my favorite thing.  Water was still so lovely and warm.

Barnegat Lighthouse; Old Barney.  Fall foliage and juniper.  Terribly framed pic of a new (to me) statue of a Lighthouse Keeper, dedicated to “the Lighthouse Keepers of the world”. (I thought I had it set on a different aspect ratio, so a bunch of my nicer sunset pics at the end got cut off like this, and I was mad.)  Barnegat Light dates from 1859; it’s 172 feet tall. You can climb to the top; but not on the day we were there. (217 steps; finally climbing it by yourself as a kid was a rite of passage.)

At bottom, reflection of the sunset, looking east across the Barnegat Inlet to the ocean. You can clearly see the long jetty built WAY out there, on the LBI side; there is one north of the inlet as well, on the Island Beach side.  They help keep the channel open.  Located just within Barnegat bay is a port for commercial fishing vessels, plus a Coast Guard station, so it’s an important inlet.

Not pictured: got to watch a whole bunch of dolphins taking advantage of the fish runs just offshore in the mornings, from the deck.  And I mean like… 10 yards offshore.  REALLY close.  I have come to realize that, not being a morning person, and our family house not having a view of the ocean, I never knew dolphins were such a regular sight!  It was very cool to watch them fishing, and occasionally body-surfing the waves.  But I didn’t have a good camera with me and my phone’s zoom wasn’t up to the task. (I have some pics where *I* know that dark blotch there is a dolphin, but you know.)

Anyway, it was lovely to be in familiar places again. We’re already talking about going back next year.

A few days ago I returned from an Actual Week’s Vacation!  A bunch of friends and I rented a beach house on Long Beach Island, NJ (where I partly grew up and where my Mom lived until only a few years ago). I hadn’t been back since Mom moved to assisted living, and I missed it.  You can rent houses real cheap in October – but in fact we had PERFECT weather. Warm but not hot, the ocean itself was 70 F (which is as warm as it really gets on the Jersey Shore). 

I took So Many Pics.  So many that I’ll be doing a second post tomorrow.

Here:

Sunset on the first day, from the upper deck.  (I don’t even know what was up with that almost woven effect in the clouds but it was spectacular.)

Bear Mountain Carousel in Bear Mountain State Park, NY.  (We drove through on our way down, and the Carousel was open and working, so we stopped. It features a bunch of local animals, and the entire thing with all the paintings is just gorgeous.)

The view from the deck off the living room.  Wonderful place to sit and watch and listen to the ocean, while having a cup of tea in the morning.  Or any time, really.  (Signs on the dunes say: Stay Off the Dunes, and Don’t Feed the Seagulls, lol.)

Would it be a trip to the shore without mini-golf? I think not!  Sand Trap, the mini-golf course of my youth, my beloved.  (It’s been redone a bit since the time when I was REALLY small, but is still wonderfully familiar.)

Only subjecting you to one of eight billion pics I took for identification purposes of sandpipers.  Conclusion: either spotted sandpipers (in fall/winter plumage) or semi-palmated sandpipers; need to do more investigation. In the foreground, a laughing gull starting into winter plumage (i.e. losing the distinctive black head.)  And, a great black-backed gull in flight.

(To be perfectly honest, I was not as avid a birder in my youth, so I thought all of the big gulls were herring gulls.  And we DID have a ton of those.  But there were a LOT of great black-backed gulls mixed in, and now I’m wondering how many we had there when I was younger and I just didn’t notice.  The most obvious difference is the color of the feathers on top – the very dark for the black-backed, obviously, while the herring gulls have much lighter-grey wings.  Easy to tell apart, now that I know.  Was I just unobservant before?)

Still to come: more sunsets!  And a lighthouse!