Sometimes a day just doesn’t start out right, and you can wish that things only get better rather than worse.
Today was such a day.
Because Blydenburgh County Park has no hook-ups other than water, we couldn’t use our electric coffee maker. Yes, things are rough – it is camping after all. Instead, we use a coffee maker which looks like an electric coffee maker but sits on top of a stove burner for its heat source. It normally works, but it takes over 20 minutes to brew ten cups.
It also has a flaw – when the spout of the carafe doesn’t depress a lever, the hot water doesn’t flow. Well maybe it isn’t a flaw; it’s supposedly a feature – allowing one to remove it, by cutting off the brew flow so one can sneak a cup of coffee before the entire process is complete. Putting the carafe back makes the flow continue again. So much for today’s science lesson.
Now back at the point. As the coffee was brewing, the carafe’s spout was not depressing the lever, so the brew chamber overflowed. Coffee and grounds were erupting all over. Yuk, not only a mess, but it would take another 20 minutes to make another batch.
Marianne wisely suggested we go out for breakfast. And I knew the perfect place to get such a meal on Long Island – an authentic diner!
Off we went in search for that perfect diner. If you’ve ever spent any time in this neck of the woods you know when you’ve found such a place. It has to be made of neon and chrome and resemble a railroad car.
We ended up driving about 10 miles until we found such a place – the Ft. Dix Diner. It looked perfect, and the parking lot was fairly full, a good sign. I had Eggs Benedict, with three eggs for only $8.25. A deal – and it was delicious.
After breakfast I decided to find the first house I ever lived in when I immigrated to this country in the fall of 1955. Heck Ft. Dix was at least halfway there!
I put 32 Gates Avenue into the GPS and it came up with the most direct route. But that route wasn’t going to work for me because of the 7’ 10” height limitation of the roads the GPS wanted me to take. I now needed to use the compass in my head to get us in the right direction before the GPS could take over again.
Unfortunately after five decades, the compass in my head was a little rusty, so it took a little longer than it should have, but we finally found it, avoiding all of those vertically challenging roads.
About 9am we parked in front of the house. The neighborhood looked great, most of the houses had been modernized, but the biggest change was the trees. When I moved there over 50 years ago the trees were seedlings or plants that were held erect with stakes and twine. Now they were big, really mature, and throwing real shadows, as were some of hedges and shrubs. Also the modernization of the house included eliminated the green shingles on top half of the split level as well as the pink equivalent on the house next door.
As I approached the home to ring the door bell, a woman got into her car to back outof the driveway. When I knocked on her car window, I slightly startled her but I convinced her to roll down her window. I identified myself as having lived in the home 55 years ago. That warmed her up. We chatted a bit, including her telling me that they were only the third owners of the house having lived there over 30 years, but she was in a hurry to get somewhere so she invited me to come back after 5pm to meet with her husband, who supposedly would love to meet us.
She left, and we continued walking around the neighborhood, then the couple next door came out of their house to see why this big pick-up truck with kayaks on the top had stopped in front of their home. He was on his way to work, but she stayed on the front lawn and filled us in with a quick history of the neighborhood, since they have lived in the house for 28 years, and absolutely loved the area.
My old house was immediately next to a school yard, Bethpage Elementary School, the first school I ever attended. I still remember the first day my mother literally had to drag me the couple of hundred yards to the principal’s office to enroll me in kindergarten. I begged her and begged her not to make me go because I didn’t speak English, only German.
Using the total immersion method before it even had a name, I was rapidly assimilated into the American way of life. My classmates even brought me to their homes to show off the German kid. One mother offered me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an after school snack, and she was totally amazed that I’d never heard of such a thing. I loved it, and when I got home I told me mom to buy peanut butter, Skippy brand, the next time she went to the supermarket.
Shortly after we moved it, a new school, Pine Avenue School, was built immediately adjacent to Bethpage Elementary, and when it opened, I attended it. I had stopped by the old neighborhood on my 1971 trip around the U.S. and both schools were still there, but now only Pine Avenue remained. According to the neighbor, Bethpage stood empty for about 15 of years, a deteriorating hulk before it was ultimately torn down.
After enough photos, we returned to the campground to pick-up the dogs and head to one of my favorite places on Long Island, Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt. He hated being called “Teddy”, preferred “Colonel” instead. I had visited the home in Oyster Bay, only a few miles north of our Long Island house, in 1958 with my family, drove by in 1971 when it was too early to be open, then again in 1998 while I was teaching in northern New Jersey. But this was the first time Marianne had ever been here.
I have to admit that I have a yearning to see presidential homes, I’ve been to quite a few, and I would add a least a couple more on this trip that I’d never been to before.
We left the dogs in the truck while we took a tour of the house. This home has two distinguishing features to me, one it is dark inside, dominated by dark wood paneling, and in order to preserve its historical value, the windows shades are all halfway drawn blocking the rays of most of the illuminating light; and two, there are animal heads, hides, and tusks just about everywhere.
From here we headed about 20 miles east to Flushing, NY, near Kissena Park to find my old home on Oak Avenue. I didn’t remember the actual house number and when I called my mom she didn’t either, so we just cruised up and down the street a few times snapping photographs of the most likely candidates. This neighborhood, too, had changed, almost everyone appeared to be Asian. And of course the houses have changed in appearance with different paint schemes, add-ons, bay windows, and of course, bigger trees and shrubs.
Returning to the campground we made another stop at 32 Gates Ave. since it was a quarter past five. I knocked on the door, but sadly there was no answer. I missed an opportunity to see the inside of the house. As we were leaving, after taking yet more photos, the next door neighbor came out and greeted us again. We chatted for a couple of minutes before she left to visit another one of her neighbors. When we left, we saw her sitting with her neighbor on that home’s front steps.
Back at the campground we took the dogs to one of only two off-leash dog parks in all of Long Island and it's right here in Blydenburgh. It's extremely popular and has two large sites, one for dogs smaller than 25 lbs. and one for larger dogs. Our dogs finally got the opportunity to mingle with East coast dogs. Molly and Coco weren't all that impressed, they spent most of their time checking out pMail and playing with each other. I particularly like this photo of Coco being chased (and apparently nipped in the butt!).
We craved for the best pizza in the area, and our camp hosts recommended a place called Umberto’s, about 8 miles east of us. They didn’t have the actual address, but it was easy enough to find.
Umberto’s was packed on a Thursday evening indicating that this was a great place. It was. Pizza-by-the-slice was the order of the day; we each had a slice of mergherita and a slice of Sicilian pizza plus a huge dinner salad, all for about $20. We received our order within a couple of minutes, and boy, was it delicious. Our camp hosts picked it right! And once again our diets were put on temporary hold.
We got back to the trailer with the generator still keeping the a/c cool for the dogs, and still enough time to keep it cool before we turned in for the night.
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