Where I'm From.

First off, welcome to the new blog, an offshoot of my Thoughts of Jersey Girl.

I thought a nice way to start off with a new post, a real post, not a list, would be for me to clue you in to where I live and where I come from although it probably doesn't explain my wanderlust and desire to see the world.

I live in a town by the Jersey Shore, and if you live in New Jersey, I live off exit 105. If you didn't get that, don't worry, you wouldn't know unless you were from here.

I've grown up in Jersey my whole life.

Seriously. My whole life.

I have only left the state to live in Pennsylvania and it lasted approximately four month. It isn't my crowning achievement through life.

I didn't begin to travel on my own until I began working at my current job for AAA. I'm a retail agent there and my job has allowed me to travel cheaper then I would have been able to before, and now I take full advantage of it. My parents weren't big travelers, my father could always do without it and my mom had done it all before, our family trips were always to Maine to visit my grandparents on my dad's side and to Germany to visit my Oma and Sweden to visit my cousins. The only family trip I had ever taken without visiting family was to Hershey Park in 1991.

I was 7.

Some traveling life right?

But back to where I live...

Before I got married this past May, I grew up in West Long Branch, NJ, a very typical town for the area, white, Catholic, and upper middle class. When my husband Danny and I were getting ready to get married it was obvious we couldn't afford a house, and an apartment was our only option. Because I'm a spoiled girl, in my mind if I was going to live in a tiny apartment and have to pay $1000 average for a small roof over my head, I was going to live by the beach. Danny wasn't originally to happy, but now it's safe to say he loves living here sometimes more then I do.

Because I'm just so shocking, I moved one town over from where I grew up to Long Branch, a city that use to be the getaway for the rich and famous and has even been featured in paintings, specifically by Winslow Homer who lived and painted here.




But now Long Branch looks much different then during the days of Winslow Homer and the Victorian Era. This is what my neighborhood looks like today. It's a nice downtown neighborhood in the good area of Long Branch. (There is a ghetto section of Long Branch, and West End, North End and Elberon are the nice parts of the town, I'm in West End.)



It's a nice place to be because all the small shops and eateries are near by. My favorite is the Windmill. They make beach food all year round and are luckily open till 3am when you and your friends are all drunk and oddly need cheese fries.



Not all places in Long Branch and the shore area stay open all year long, places like the Lighthouse, a great place to get Italian Ice (not water ice) and ice cream.



They close every year in October and will reopen in April before the Bennies begin to descend again on our quiet towns. If you don't know what a Benny is, just so you know, you are one and can get more definitions on other blogs on www.margotisyourhero.blogspot.com.

But the real reason I moved here, the reason people want to come here and live here can be summed up in a series of photos that I took just a block and a half from my house along the boardwalk:























































So now that you've seen exactly where I come from, maybe it'll give you a touch of the wanderlust to at least see the place where I call home, the place where I can get cheese fries at 2:30am and where I can take nightly walks along the breaking waves with my husband.