Having just experienced Cape May “off season,” much to our mutual delight, it got me thinking about my notional love for the off-season shore town. I dug around here on Uncorrected to see if I’d expressed my affection thus in these virtual pages, but could find no record. Excelsior, then, because I wanted to wax ecstatic.

I was finishing up grad school in the spring of 2002 and had a job interview in Ocean City, NJ, for a school psychologist position that opened up. I was pretty excited about the prospect of working for a nice district, but doubly enthused about being in a familiar shore town when the tourists aren’t there. Aka off season.

I thought about how cool it would be to live there, even. But hey: I didn’t know much about the cost of living at the Jersey Shore back then.

That draw, though, continues to this day, and I think we all (as in the four of us) share it to some degree. Sure, Rhonda and I tend to set the vacation schedule, but we get no complaints: Rehoboth in the fall is an example. I’ve eyed up other spots, and I imagine we’ll keep Cape May off season as a goal to shoot for when we can. I have notions of a Vrbo near Sandy Hook and taking the ferry into the city, too.

I don’t know what it is. I think part of it is that I don’t like crowds. I’m a bit of an introvert. The notion of enjoying something more privately that is often subjected to gaudy shows of insta-lookat-me appeals to me somehow. It’s a weird balance for sure: an empty restaurant is a bad sign. To the middle, I suppose, whether in aggregate or individual circumstances.

So yeah: I’d like to go back to Cape May.