Tag Archives: hamptons

The Last Thing I’ll Say About the Hamptons This Year

Filed under just pictures, travels
Tagged as , ,

Our trip to the Hamptons a couple of weeks ago started out pretty ominously. My roommate (who prefers that I refer to him as my landlord), Jack, and I met our friend Jeff at his new apartment in Queens that has one of those old-style elevators where you have to close an outer door before the door inside the elevator will close. So we loaded our suitcases full of clothes, duffel bags full of liquor, backpacks full of Xboxes, and arms full of cameras into this 2-by-3-foot thing, let the outer door close behind us, pressed the button to go down, watch as the inner door slid closed . . . and just sat there.

It took Jeff about three seconds to silently flip out and then press every button, ring the emergency bell, and begin calling the super repeatedly. After about five seconds of that, I started looking around to figure out if any fresh air was getting into the thing while Jack, I’m sure, was contemplating which of us would be more delicious to eat if it came down to that: the kid raised on Caribbean food or the kid raised on steak and potatoes.

Eventually, Jeff and Jack pried open the inner door and figured out that the outer door just hadn’t closed all the way. So after stopping on every floor thanks to Jeff’s button-pushing, we were on our way to the loveliest dollhouse on the East coast:

The Hamptons

It was dark by the time we got there, so we spent the first night hanging out inside, but as soon as the sun rose (okay, more like 11 a.m.), we were out the door for some lemon ricotta pancakes and some buttermilk pancakes with crispy bacon:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

As soon as we got back to the house, I walked across the street to the beach. Now, I hadn’t expected the water to actually be warm enough to swim in, but I hadn’t expected the crazy waves. These things had to be eight feet high:

The Hamptons

and green!:

The Hamptons

and coming so far up the shore in some places that they were making separate pools and cutting out big sand cliffs:

The Hamptons

I understood why some of the houses had boards on them still from the hurricane weeks before. And I hope you’re not bored yet, because here are 15 million more pictures of them:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons
butterfly!

The Hamptons
closer butterfly!

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

Jeff and Jack drove by the beach to pick me up so we could meet everyone at the grocery store to stock the house for the weekend. I found this greeting card resting on the pizza I was about to buy, and it actually did dissuade me from buying that pizza. But not the one next to it. BOO-YAH.

The Hamptons

Our friends Anthony and Chantee arrived that night, and we spent the evening eating Anthony’s cheeses on bread drizzled with honey and solving world problems.

The next day, we went on a loooooooong walk on the beach that included so much propping-Anthony’s-camera-up-on-flip-flops-and-things-to-take-pictures-of-ourselves and then went into “town”, which is a five-block strip of boutiques (that all sell ice cream in addition to whatever their actual purpose is) and restaurants on one street. We took uproarious photos that are all trapped on Anthony’s camera and stopped by a bakery where I got something so delicious it’s getting its own post on donuts4dinner.com. Just knowing that it’s in one of the bags in front of Jack and Anthony is kind of making me mouth-froth right now:

The Hamptons

While everyone else sat out on the deck reading, I got up the nerve to stick my feet in the pool for, like, a whole half an hour before they turned blue. Then, that night, we had a family dinner at the house and then drove to the end of the peninsula to see this:

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

The Hamptons

And all the joy we felt can be expressed in this picture of Chantee and me:

The Hamptons

It’s just so great there, you guys. The house is three stories of plushy couches and TVs and stereo systems, so there’s always something going on somewhere, and everyone gets along when I’m not accusing someone of having bad taste in music, and everyone stays up so late talking about so much, and we walk to the beach in sweaters at midnight, and we stand out on the balcony and look at the moon and are perfect.

NYC: The Really Hot Boyfriend Who Beats Me

Filed under living in new york is neat, living in new york sucks so hard, travels
Tagged as , , ,

The Hamptons feels so far away from New York City that I sometimes forget I’m still in the same time zone. We ride around in cars there and eat pastries on the empty patios of cafés and stock up for the weekend in grocery stores with aisles big enough to fit carts. The town has ten boutiques, and the people who live there make conversation with you for no reason.

But on the drive home, you quickly realize how close to the city you still are. On the road trips I used to make in college to South Carolina and Chicago, I remember stopping for gas at highway exits that had little else. A truck stop, an adult bookstore, and a McDonald’s perched on a hill with nothing but miles and miles of farmland as far as I could see. I always felt like I was on the prairie, even if I was really in the middle of the Appalachians. On the way back from the Hamptons, if you blink your eye, you’re in Queens. The exits all lead to neighborhoods with constantly-busy streets, strollers full of babies of every ethnicity, skateboarding teenagers, shopping bags on every arm.

There’s no rest. I feel my chest tighten as soon as the row houses come into view and a taxi cuts us off. The fact that I hold my breath all day in NYC is only noticeable after a weekend away with nothing but exhalations. It’s like I’m always bracing myself for the worst.

Brooklyn Bridge

But then we’re on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the city’s skyline is the most exciting one I’ve ever seen, and I tell my friend Jeff, “If I’m this happy to see New York after only a weekend away, imagine how I’d feel after a year.” It’s scary to imagine yourself as a tourist here, older and settled somewhere else and without any more ties to this city than to London or Tokyo. Part of the thing about living in NYC is feeling like you’re in on a special secret that no one else knows about.

Well, no one but the 18 million other people who live here.

To the Hamptons Once More

Filed under living in new york is neat, travels
Tagged as , ,

Weekend Getaway

My friends and I have gone back to our house in the Hamptons one last time this weekend to pretend like summer didn’t end already. I guess if the ocean’s too cold, we’ll just have to spend the time in our heated pool, sipping our alcoholic beverages and peeing in the water at length to keep ourselves warm.

If Ever There Was a Time to Use the Word “Vacay”: Hamptons 2011

Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, travels
Tagged as , , ,

I’ve had a week of work and a trip to Ohio since my weekend in the Hamptons, but I WILL NOT BE DETERRED from writing about a memorable event for once, because man, this thing was memorable. Eleven friends and I booked the same Southampton beach house we enjoyed for a weekend last year and were fortunate enough to get a $200-a-night discount on it thanks to some springtime water damage that left us without kitchen cabinets. ($200 off per night just because we had to store our groceries on the kitchen window seat instead of the cabinets. Talk about richpeopleproblems.)

My friend Nik and I met our friends Ash and Mike in Queens on Thursday morning so they could drive us in their car to a for-real grocery store with more than five aisles, the Cheesecake Factory in Long Island, and the pet hotel, where they left their dog, Gizmo, for the weekend:

Hamptons 2011

Nik spent most of the trip doing this in the back seat to show off that dammit, he was on vacation, and he was going to wear his most comfortable and most inappropriate shorts:

Hamptons 2011

We arrived at the house around 3 p.m., greeted by our friends Chantee, Brandon, and Gretchen, and took in the most wonderful sight in the world: the ocean mere steps away from our front door:

Hamptons 2011

Our house is this crazy three-story behemoth with 12 beds, all of them in these charmingly-terrible themed rooms:

Hamptons 2011

But we rarely ever see the house before 9 p.m., because there’s this

Hamptons 2011

right across the street. It was unfortunately too early in the season for swimming, but just the feel of the water on my feet and the sand in my hands and in my hair and up my butt sends me into this blissful state of sedation that requires no actual paddling.

The boys went on a drive to look at the multi-million-dollar homes surrounding us, so we girls sat in the downstairs living room, talking about boys and gazing out into the bay behind the house:

Hamptons 2011

We weren’t the only ones gazing, though:

Hamptons 2011

Earlier in the car, Nik had been making fun of the superficiality of southern rappers, saying they only talked about cash and cars and girls. But when he’d left the house on his drive, he’d left his iPod hooked up to the living room speakers, and as we sat talking about our sordid dating pasts, a song came on with a chorus that went, “Ro-tating my tires. I’m just ro-tating my tires.” Rap is dumb.

We met the boys for dinner in town at a restaurant where women with shawls wrapped around their shoulders glared at us across the patio, and I took two pictures that I totally thought I could successfully make into a panorama later. And I did! Unless you look at Nik’s right shoulder, which is freakishly square and cut down the middle:

Hamptons 2011

We spent that night playing Xbox Kinect, drinking Mike’s Hard everyflavor until we contracted diabetes, and just generally feeling superior to our friends who weren’t arriving until the next evening.

The next morning, Gretchen and I went on walk down the beach that was supposed to last only a few minutes and therefore didn’t involve me wearing any sunscreen. (Because I learned nothing from the sunburn last year that still has my back looking like it’s covered in tiger stripes.) Our section of the beach is basically just sand, but we found that farther east, there are piles of mermaid’s purses, a crab graveyard, a jetty, freakishly big seagulls, wildly green seaweed, and not a single shark that we could see, despite that week’s earlier sighting:

Hamptons 2011

Hamptons 2011

Gretchen, Ash, Chantee, and I went back to the beach that afternoon (this time with sunscreen!) and walked in the opposite direction to the end of the beach, where we found a shelterhouse full of ice cream treats and constantly-tan people who probably think they’re quite sophisticated living two hours from New York City.

That night, we all showered and started to pile into our cars to see the new X-Men movie before checking Brandon’s iPad and realizing the closest theatre was more than 30 miles away. So we sat considering our options

Hamptons 2011

until the pool boy (for real) came and told us he’d found a kitten underneath the house. Having raised approximately 152 cats while growing up on the farm, I suggested that we leave it there for a while and check to see if the mother would return for it; mothers carry their young from location to location one at a time, I’m sure you know, so I figured there was a good chance she’d left it there on purpose. But Mike was apparently overcome with fatherly instincts and decided he needed to take the kitten to a vet, who confirmed that she had recently been fed.

But I guess you can’t dump a kitten back underneath a house once you pull her out, so Mike and Ash are now the proud owners of baby Penelope! Whom Ash tried to name Katniss after the character in The Hunger Games, which is the cleverest name ever! Because it’s a cat! Get it? But not everyone has read the book to understand the name. So she’s Penelope. But I’ll obviously still be calling her Katniss in secret.

Here she is sitting in Nik’s lap, right before she peed a pee that covered the entire front of his shirt:

Hamptons 2011

Jack, Roxanne, Beth, Eric, and Christine all arrived late that night, and we spent the rest of the evening watching movies, playing Xbox, and making fun of Nik for getting so sunburned that day it was making him nauseated. Haha, skin cancer is funny.

We spent the entire next day at the beach, and then that night, Eric, Christine, Gretchen, and I went for a walk along the bay, which is the much more interesting/much more disgusting body of water behind our house. While the ocean side has clear water and little visible sealife, the bay is green and carpeted with breeding snails, dueling horseshoe crabs, and oozy sand you don’t want to stick your feet in.

Right off the bat, Eric spotted a horseshoe crab on its back way too far up on the beach and flipped it over with a stick to see if he could lead it back to water. Its tail was wrapped in a clump of seaweed, and half of its legs seemed to be nonfunctioning, but it sloooooooowly turned back toward the bay and inched its way along, traveling whole feet in the hour we spent exploring the beach:

Hamptons 2011

Hamptons 2011

Hamptons 2011

The water in the bay had retreated hundreds and hundreds of feet so that we could walk on the squishy sand that only hours before had been covered over in murkiness. There was some concern that the sand wouldn’t hold up and we’d find ourselves ankle-deep in stinky snail sand at any minute, but we made it back to the house mostly un-gross and were greeted by Chantee for our family dinner:

Hamptons 2011

Yes, that was an entire plate of Pizza Rolls in front of me. Some of which I actually shared with my friends. But most of which I did not.

The next morning, we went to the beach one last time, and I admired the elderly couples there sitting on lawn chairs in sweatshirts and ballcaps, too chicken to swim but still unable to resist the draw of the water. I think a lot of people use their Hamptons presence for economical braggarting, but it’s much more special than that to me. Most of my vacations are spent in Ohio, and while I obviously wouldn’t trade those for anything, I still feel a lot of anxiety around flight delays, trying to fit in all of the visits to relatives and old friends, and making sure I look presentable so no one thinks I’m falling apart out here. Traveling by car, listening to music, escaping all of the pressure of the city, not caring about my hair or my makeup or my clothes, not having any responsibility, being near the water . . . truly my idea of paradise, and it’s only two hours away.

Hamptons 2011

Back to the Hamptons

Filed under living in new york is neat, travels
Tagged as , ,

So, I’ve been sick since Friday. I left work after lunch that day and haven’t been back since, but I still managed to infect at least two co-workers in my wake.

And now today, twelve of us are going back to the house we rented in the Hamptons last year so I can infect even more of them! Despite having fallen on my head while Rollerblading last year, crying for five hours straight, and getting so sunburned I still have tiger stripes on my back a year later, I am so excited for this trip. We’re right on the bay, right across the street from the ocean, and right next to some people who stare every time a non-white friend shows up.

There’s literally nothing to do but sit on the deck with our feet in the pool or sit on the beach with our winterpale shoulders collecting sun. But not too much sun.

Check out the rest of last year’s photos here!