Under the weather Feb. 6, 2025

More snow turned to rain, which is just fine with me, even if it spoils Friday’s Magical Mystery Tour to Point Pleasant.

I know it sounds stupid to go to a shore town in winter, but summer trips are worse.

Point Pleasant has a lot of history for me, especially when my uncle moved there and became the manager of a marina there in 1977.

But our gang made a couple of trips there prior to that, especially after I bought the 1960 Chevy Impala in 1975 and Pauly convinced me to visit our friend, Alf, who was managing some bungalows there, and had invited a girl we all knew years earlier from Little Falls. Naturally, Pauly absconded with the girl, locking Alf out of his own room for a little monkey business.

Normally, our Friday trips take us west or north, but with the snow, we dare not risk a trip in either direction until spring.

Most likely, we’ll be heading up to Woodstock once the weather gets better to visit some abandoned hotel we read about.

Until then, we’ll go to closer places, depending on the weather.

I managed to get our two rescued kittens fixed in January, even though I had to waste two whole days waiting for them in Lake Hopatcong. It was too cold to spend too much time along the shore of the lake and so I spent one day keeping warm in my car, and the other visiting an old friend from Little Falls.

Our previous Magical Mystery Tour took us to Seaside Heights. But it wasn’t the same. The Chatterbox where our band played in the early 1980s is long gone. A fire gutted the Seaside Park side of the boardwalk, and the rebuild just isn’t the same.

Fortunately, I managed to get there in August 2012 and again in October the same year to take pictures prior to superstorm Sandy that damaged a lot as well.

I used to go to the Seaside Boardwalk in winter back when my family lived in Toms River and would take my mother there. I still have the photos I took of her, iconic in some ways. I also have a photo of two of my uncles with my grandmother from at some point in the mid-1980s, the last picture of them together.

I don’t know what to expect in Point Pleasant since our last trip in winter largely found the place empty and everything – including the bathrooms – locked up. We had to go up to Asbury Park to use the toilets.

I don’t expect we’ll see whales or dolphins, though we saw some during our last trip to Asbury recently, some kind of sign from God I guess.

email to Al Sullivan