summertime and german pie

Tonight is cool and rainy and fairly miserable, but these are some of the things that have been good about Frankfurt lately:

Balcony brunch that ended with raspberry brown sugar gratin (Greek yogurt, half the brown sugar, mixed with blackberries -- perfection). Writing while sipping Eiskaffee on the Freßgass, on days that sent me running for the shade. (Re-)breaking in Katherine's pie plate (best part of today, and sure to be an excellent part of tomorrow, too). Sipping a mojito on the roof at Deck 8, with my feet in a wading pool and the skyline all around. Lounging by the Main on a lazy Sunday, with the hopes of more such summer days to come.

the trip down south

Last summer was a little bit magical in that I had a stretch of ten weekends in a row in Stone Harbor, starting the weekend after the Fourth of July and continuing well into September. Somehow, every one of those weekends, Friday would roll around and there wouldn't be a single thing that I needed to stay (too) late for or that required weekend work. And so I'd ride the A train up to Port Authority and then catch the late-evening NJ Transit bus number 319 down the Garden State Parkway, first to Toms River and then to Atlantic City (a city that's best from a distance, a horizon mirage from Stone Harbor or bright lights over marshlands, curving in on the expressway). South of Atlantic City, the bus winds along island roads, stopping in Ocean City and Sea Isle City before crossing the rusted, impossibly narrow bridge over Townsends Inlet and onto Seven Mile Island, where I'd get off at the corner of my street in the middle of the night and walk toward the wet-salt smell of the ocean.

I spent every Friday night for ten straight weeks on a bus last year, but here's a secret: I love that ride. Both going and coming, I love the looping entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, how it circles the Weehawken football stadium like a snake and rises up to reveal the Manhattan skyline from afar. I love the flat wide expanse of the Garden State, the views of suburbia down the roads that intersect with it, and the moments when the constant trees give way to water and bloody orange sunsets. I love cutting between the Garden State and the islands on causeways, water and marshland and houses on stilts, roadside diners and seafood stores. And at the end of the ride, the payoff: Stone Harbor, a weekend or longer on the shore. It can't be beat.

en why see

Oh, New York. This was the first time I'd been back since moving to Frankfurt, and I was a little bit worried that it would have changed, or (more likely) that I would have changed, that the fact that I like Frankfurt now would have lessened my love for New York in some way, as if there were only a certain amount of city love to be doled out from the pot. Ridiculous. On its own merits, NYC is still pretty much uncontested for my favorite city, and there are some other undeniable advantages to living there, proximity to Stone Harbor and therefore my family being chief among them. I'm immensely, ridiculously lucky to be living in Europe right now, but I'm certainly keeping New York in the back of my mind.

Having said that, New York is easiest to love when you have unlimited free time and unlimited money (the combination that is almost certain never to exist when you actually live there). For the days that I was there, I shopped and ate and hung out with some of my very favorite people. I went to Amanda's house for the Super Awesome Fun BBQ of Pan-Asian Delights, which was exactly as advertised! (I was the one who came up with the name, but Amanda and her family made it happen.) I spent a rainy afternoon at my favorite coffee shop in New York, 71 Irving Place. I gorged on guacamole and an it's-five-o'clock-right-freaking-here margarita at Dos Caminos SoHo, and inhaled three tacos at Pinche Taqueria as Frida Kahlo and her ever-elegant unibrow looked on. Most excellent of all, Amanda and I waited for Shakespeare in the Park tickets in Central Park on an unbelievably perfect morning, sipping iced coffee and gnawing on an H&H bagel and listening to a man play the Star Wars theme song on his flute as a parade of uptown dogs and their owners strolled past -- a uniquely New York morning in all possible ways.

We feared rain that evening -- if it rains, that night's show is canceled, and there are no rain dates -- but the weather held, and so we got to watch the bizarreness that is The Winter's Tale. Though long, it was a surprisingly entertaining show, and we were amused to note that the humor of mooning an audience is timeless.

baseball, ray.

When I was little, the rule was that once you arrived in Stone Harbor, you did your absolute best to stay on Seven Mile Island for as long as possible, uninterrupted. Trips to the ACME in Cape May Court House were allowed, but only because food was wildly overpriced at the grocery stores on the island; beyond that, leaving the island for any reason, even to go for lobster at Carmen's in Sea Isle City, was to be done only with great reluctance or, ideally, not at all. In recent years, starting around the time when my brothers and I could drive, and increasing dramatically once I started taking the bus to and from New York, we've begun to explore the area more, from going for high tea at the Carriage House in Cape May to visiting Lucy the Elephant in Margate, but before that we kept to Seven Mile Island, and the southern three miles of it only, at that.

But there's always been one exception to the park-your-car-in-Stone-Harbor-and-do-not-move-it rule: the yearly pilgrimage to Philadelphia for a Phillies game. In spite of spending all my summers an hour and fifteen minutes from Philadelphia, I've been to Center City on exactly two occasions; but I've been just over the Walt Whitman Bridge to Citizens Bank Park and, before it, Veterans Stadium most every summer for as long as I can remember. We'd leave the beach early and drive to Philly for an early dinner, first at Medora's and now, in recent years, at Chickie's & Pete's, a sports bar/restaurant chain whose crab fries (crinkle-cut, spiced with Old Bay, and served with molten cheese for dipping) are so good that, when an acquaintance and I discussed them at Frankfurt's Christmas market last year, we nearly cried for the fact that we couldn't have them right that moment.

And then there's the game itself. I'd long looked forward to the first time I'd be over 21 at a Phillies game (and had not been at a Phillies game since I was 20) but the night was too hot to drink anything but water. No matter: we shared lemon water ice and bottled water and, stuck to the plastic of our seats, watched the Phillies royally stink against the Atlanta Braves all the way into extra innings.

true vacation

I recently spent two weeks in two of my favorite places in the world: New York City and Stone Harbor, New Jersey. I was in Stone Harbor for the Fourth of July and for my 24th birthday, on the tenth, bookended by a few days in New York. Stone Harbor was excellent. There was the usual Fourth of July barbeque at McGucks', with bonus bay swimming; three days of hanging out with Amanda; a truly awesome 15-mile bike ride with Dad to the Wildwood boardwalk and back; beach days that continued until eight at night, because it was just that beautiful out, and the usual five p.m. Stone Harbor breeze switch didn't occur to chase us off the beach, shivering; Backbays crabcakes and Henny's chowder from the new take-out location and Springer's ice cream; all the classics and more. As Bethany said, being in Stone Harbor is like being at home and being on vacation all at once -- perfection.