⛳️ Golf cart life | Down the Shore

In a summer of transformation, the golf carts are a sign post.

I watch them go back and forth from the beach — kids, chairs, boogie boards hanging off them, sometimes precariously, but not always. Seems cool?

As Erin McCarthy documents in our story here, golf cart life is surging at the beach (the better to park your regular car(s) and not move them for the week.) It’s another sign of the massive wealth that has parked itself in our beach towns. One man told Erin he paid $21,000 for his low-speed electric vehicle.

“I’d say most people either want the least expensive or the most expensive,” Ethan McGinnis, co-owner of South Jersey Electric Vehicles, told Erin, summing up a lot of things at the Jersey Shore. He’s onto something.

As with everything these days, I’ve seen the griping on Facebook: the carts taking up space in crosswalks, whether they’re safe, whether they help or hurt traffic, whether it’s fair to take up more parking spots with them, whether they end up where they shouldn’t. And whatnot. (Children under 8 are required to ride in a car seat; the carts are limited to roads where the speed limit is no more than 25 mph.)

Other reactions:

One golf cart owner said on Facebook that someone had repeatedly shouted at her from a car to “get her [expletive deleted] golf cart off the street.”

Wrote one person in a Cape May Facebook group: “As a pedestrian I’d rather be hit by a golf cart than a truck. Maybe we should ban where cars are allowed to go.”

Another: “I want to vomit when I see the little kids on the back … so many rear-enders happen with texting / inattentive driving.”

And the last word: A lot of people here need to be wrapped in bubble wrap, stop ruining it for all of us with your crazy negativity. Golf carts are incredibly fun. I’ve been to islands that were predominantly golf carts and they were so fun to drove around town. No one got hurt and these people do this all day and night. I trust a motorist way less than the driver of a golf cart. Get a golf cart and stop being so scared of life.

📮 Would you rather be riding around in a golf cart at the beach? Do you think they add to life on the islands? Or are they a menace? Let me know what you think and I’ll include your most interesting responses by replying to this email.

Have ideas or news tips? Send them to me here.

🌊 The water finally warmed up!

— Amy S. Rosenberg (🐦 Find me at @amysrosenberg. 📷 Follow me on Insta at @amysrosenberg. 📧 Email me here.)

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👕 The Let’s Go Brandon shop in Toms River, which went all in on anti-Joe Biden merchandise, is rebranding.

🤬 Meanwhile in Wildwood, the mayor is upset about the vulgar T-shirt shops.

🐟 Neighbors on Osborn Island in Little Egg Harbor are coping with a massive and smelly fish kill.

🦅 As a fatal virus looms over bald eagles, N.J. conservationists are fighting to keep the bird on the endangered species list.

🌊 Frank Kummer reports there is good news about horseshoe crabs.

🧐 Teresa Giudice’s Atlantic City attorney, Jim Leonard, is back on Season 14, Episode 12 of “Real Housewives of New Jersey.” As in, according to one subtitled screen shot I was sent (by my daughter), “James Leonard’s office is near the meth clinic.”

⛱️ On LBI, the architect of this eye-popping house felt the freedom of the beach.

🙏 The investigation is continuing into the terrible crash outside Atlantic City that killed a pregnant woman and one other.

☕ Hang in a coffee shop: Hira Qureshi got caffeinated from Brigantine to Cape May and found 10 great coffee spots.

➕ Plus one: To which I would add, based on highly reliable insider knowledge, Cape May’s Out There Coffee.

🍝 Now open: In Ventnor, from the owner of the former Domenico’s, the anticipated Mamma Lena’s.

📽️ Watch this trailer for the new Bob Dylan biopic filmed in Cape May.

🌶️ Go beyond pizza: Check out Vernon Ogrodnick’s well-researched picks for best Boardwalk food.

✒️ Inky time: Attend Wildwood’s Tattoo Beach Bash.

⚾ Not just Kelce: Meet the athletes, including Cole Hamels, Brent Celek, and AJ Feeley, at the Point in Sea Isle City.

🏊‍♀️.🚴 🏃🏾‍♀️ Watch the athletes (or watch out for traffic) this weekend during the Atlantic City Triathlon.

🍅 Pop-up field-to-table dinner: Celebrate the Jersey tomato at West Cape May’s Beach Plum Farm.

A $10 million dredging project in the back bays of Cape May County will help this town turn an old landfill site, where municipal waste rose to 15 feet from the 1930s to the 1970s, into a landscaped area with walkways and a “living shoreline” of natural materials.

Is that town:

A. Wildwood

B. Strathmere

C. Sea Isle City

D. North Wildwood

If you think you know the answer, click on this story to find out. Or take a guess and email us the answer.

Can you order a Caesar salad at Tony’s Baltimore Grill?

We tested this question on a recent visit to the A.C. institution. And look, it’s on the menu, but I was skeptical. At Tony’s, we tend to stick to plain pizzas, the antipasto (no meat), ravioli, lately the fried mushrooms, Peroni on draft, sometimes a martini at the bar (in, say, January).

Still, when our guest ordered the Caesar, the waitress acted like it was a thing. Time passed. Finally, the waitress noted there were some big parties in the dining room, and claimed that “they’re in the back chopping more romaine,” so it could be awhile.

Hmm. That reminds me of working the police beat for The Inquirer and being told to tell editors a veteran colleague who’d left early or some such thing was “talking to the detectives.” In any case, I believe the answer is, you can try to order a Caesar salad at Tony’s Baltimore Grill, and maybe sometimes they come out with it. But you know, mostly, they’re still chopping romaine in the back, so just go with the antipasto.

Elizabeth Kimball writes: Holiday House in Cape May is a big blue retreat house, standing in the center of the beautiful Hughes Street. If you were a girl growing up in an Episcopal parish in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, you might belong to a chapter of the Girls’ Friendly Society, a club for girls with crafts, activities, and devotions. And in the summer, the prize: a week at Holiday House.

Holiday House was camp but better: sleeping in our own rooms; beach time every morning (you may have seen us in our yellow bathing caps); crafts in the afternoon; and after dinner, the Promenade or the Washington Street mall. We dressed for dinner every night and shared homemade, full-course meals. A few recipes I still think of as revelations, curried fruit, peanut butter pie, and chicken cordon bleu.

Most nights we’d have compline in the little chapel, unless we gathered on the big second floor landing for “camp fire,” belting our way through the standards. We had a custom Philly verse for “You Can’t Get to Heaven in a Rocking Chair” (’cause a rocking chair don’t go nowhere): You can’t get to heaven / on the Frankfort El / ‘Cause the Frankfort El /Goes straight to 69th Street.

My first year was 1984. It’s the place where I first learned how to be me. It’s where I first made friends with people who weren’t pretty much like me.

Holiday House is still there, Kimball writes, “and the girls still have the same old-fashioned fun. You can still stay there, or book your retreat group. You can also donate to help with upkeep.

Send us your Shore memory in 200 words, and we will publish them in this space during the summer. Send them to downtheshore@inquirer.com.

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