We have successfully visited the ocean! That may not sound very big to many people, but for us it’s a major life goal accomplished. And more than that, we had the chance to spend an entire week just being happy. So it was also a mission accomplished in terms of going on a vacation. It’s been a long time since we had something work out well (and moreover to do something without anything horrible happening), so I’m still a little bit stunned that everything went so well.
We were at Cape May for a week, so we rented a cottage. The people we rented from were very nice, and the cottage was awesome. It had a tiny 1950s kitchen (with original stove!) that I wish I could recreate at home and you could hear the ocean with the windows open. They even had a tiny pond with koi fish in it. Patrick figured out how to hook the laptop up to the TV (yay HDMI cables!) and we had our movie back ups with us so we could watch movies in the evening and play board games. And the cottage was only a few blocks from the ocean so we could walk down whenever we wanted.
It was also only about a mile from the little pedestrian shopping area. That was fun because the entire town was only about 10 miles in diameter so we were able to walk everywhere. Next year hopefully we can bring bikes since there are lots of bike paths too. Most of the houses near the town center are very old, with the gingerbread/Victorian style, so it was fun to just walk around and see all the neat architecture (and pretty flower gardens…).
They also have a lighthouse and several protected beaches for wildlife so we saw lots of interesting ocean birds, and dolphins catching fish only 30 or 40 feet off the beach.
Luckily the garden behaved itself while we were gone. When I got back the zucchini were still reasonable size and the beans hadn’t gone crazy. If I’m lucky I will get to pick zucchini this weekend. I’m also going to be trimming back some of the ‘bush’ beans that are now about 5 ft tall and climbing the tomato trellis. I need to trim them back to keep them from taking over the poor tomatoes. Amusingly enough the happiest tomatoes are the volunteers in the compost bin and the cherry tomatoes by the back door…
Still the garden is doing well this year. I’ve already frozen about a gallon of green and yellow beans and a whole bunch of wax and jalapeno peppers. We’ve even got three tiny ripe tomatoes. I’ve also got some lettuce that’s still going despite the heat. Hopefully there will be zucchini and cucumbers soon. And hopefully when we pull the garlic this week we’ll have good results!
