It is to my shame that I've often looked at adverts for Ralph Lauren, Abercrombie & Fitch and Tommy Hilfiger with a pang of longing, as beautiful people lark around in lovely clothes on amazing beaches, the like of which you just don't get in Britain (as beautiful as those beaches are).
Well all those adverts must've been shot in Montauk! The beaches are AMAZING and we found three of them! Actually, one wasn't so nice. But two out of three ain't bad.
After our nood
ley day indoors yesterday, we decided to get up and at 'em early, so headed into Montauk and picked up some clingfilm-wrapped croissants (weird) from a shop which also inexplicably sold British sweets, so I excitedly stocked up on Crunchies, Twirly Wirlys, Smarties and Turkish Delight for Maxy. Then we headed to the beach, which turns out to be just the other side of the shops and things - the beach is very much in Montauk.
The weather was just gorgeous - all blue skies and sunshine - but there were very few people on this incredible huge, sweeping beach with white breakers and big sky, with the odd beachhouse dotted along the dunes. We sat on a log and ate our breakfast, marvelling at the waves and sunshine and neverending beach.
breakfast in Montauk
After breakfast, we consulted Max's excellent guide to Montauk (seen here, throu
gh the windscreen) and had high hopes for Gin Beach. But unfortunately it was not so nice and had lots of caravans on it, so we drove to Ditch Plains Beach, which is famed for its surfing and was again, just breathtakingly amazing and pretty much deserted.
We had to almost consciously make ourselves just stop and enjoy the view, rather than dashing on somewhere else, and so took a gentle stroll down the beach, coming across the odd rockpool, looking longingly at the beachouses with private staircases down to the beach and watching some sea fishermen catch a big fish.
After walking for ages and seeing some cool rock formations in the rocks at the back of the beach, we finally found the beachhouse that we're going to buy one day when we're living in New York, and sat down looking out to sea, staggered by how lucky we are (even luckier when we have the beachhouse!).
As we got to the end of Ditch Plains Beach and rounded a corner, we found ourselves on Breakfast Beach, so needn't have done all that driving after all! With great difficulty - and spurred on by our rumbling stomachs, we headed back along the beach, trying to take everything in as much as possible, to store up as an antidote to dark grey autumn afternoons in an office in London.
We headed to Gossman's Dock for lunch, driving along in the sunniest of sunshine, listening to Vampire Weekend (EXCELLENT driving music) and pootling along these roads of nice little houses.
Gossman's Dock is vaguely hilarious - it looks a little like a theme park based on a village of yesteryear, probably in England. We hadn't realised, but today was its first day of the season, so had we come last weekend, it'd have been all closed up. Embracing the 'when in Rome...' spirit, we decided to have an enormous lunch of fresh lobster and I got ridiculously excited when we were supplied with authentic lobster bibs, as I've only ever seen those in the movies.
Me and lobster before the carnage - just excited by the bib
Unfortunately, the love affair with all things lobster came to a definite and abrupt end when I couldn't get out of my head the anatomy of it all. It was one of those times
when I couldn't separate the food I was eating from the animal it once was and there was something almost surgical about ripping the legs out of their sockets and stuff. I did my best to ignore this and eat the tasty lobster, until I pulled the head off and this massive slug of black matter - which I can only assume was brains - slopped out of the head cavity and onto the table. Ugh. I nearly barfed. Ugh. I feel sick. So that was the end of me and lobster. It was wonderful to be eating outside in the sunshine, though.
After lunch, we wandered around the twee little boutiques of Gossman's Dock, where I bought myself a baseball cap for my impending softball game next Tuesday. I also tried on a bunch of nice summer clothes, but then remembered that I was paying for the weekend, so left them all behind.
We tried to get to Andy Warhol's estate after leaving Gossman's Dock, but it was an extremely private road with a gate across it and we weren't feeling brave enough in our very-obviously-not-suited-to-offroad-driving hire car. We did however see a foal drinking from its mother on Deep Hollow Ranch - the oldest cattle ranch in the US (thanks, Maxy's Guide To Montauk).
We headed over to Montauk Point State Park and to New York State's first lighthouse and the 
fourth oldest active lighthouse in the US (will the deluge of facts never end, Maxy's Guide To Montauk?!). We climbed all the way up to the top (137 steps) and the view from the top was pretty cool, but Max was a little frightened and we were only allowed onto a tiny bit of the viewing platform. Our visit this weekend coincides with the fourth annual Long Island Lighthouse Challenge, where you visit all 9 lighthouses in Long Island and get a little passport thing stamped at each place. So there were lots of breathlessly excited challengers up there with us.
In the giftshop, Max told me there was something that would make me cry and that I wasn't to go over to a particular corner of the shop. Convinced that nothing could be so bad in the giftshop of a lighthouse, I defiantly wandered over, only to find my bottom lip quivering as I saw a nice old man standing with a pile of books smiling hopefully at every passer-by who ventured to his corner of the shop. He'd written a book about the lighthouse and was there for a special book signing event. Except no-one was buying his book and he was standing all forlorn. Max knows me too well.
From the top of the lighthouse, we had seen a massive - and somewhat sinister - radar thing poking out of dense woodland, so knew our next stop had to be Camp Hero.
Hddddrrrdrdr. It was so weird. It's another state park, so quite a lot like driving through the New Forest. There are even little picnic spots among the trees. But t
here's such a weird atmosphere there. Not helped by a man with long silver hair, bearing striking resemblance to the terrifying Uncle Bob from 'Twin Peaks' who was just walking along the road. Sinisterly. Then we drove for what seemed like quite some time, turned a corner and there he was again! Time travel, I tell you.
The whole place was freaky weird, with the big radar thingy towering above the trees and lots of scary boarded up bunkers that looked like the setting for a teen horror film where friends dare each other to go inside and are never seen again. Hdddrrrrdrdrrr.
it's sinister, it's run by the government, it's a compound(and it says, 'DO NOT ENTER BUILDING. CLOSED TO PUBLIC' on it)
Laying down rubber as we got the funk out of Camp Hero, we headed back to the hotel and had a swim before going out for the evening. I wanted to watch the sunset while drinking cocktails in a nice bar, but Max wanted to sample the delights of The Movie so we went to see 'Iron Man'. Which suuuuuucked.
But the evening was saved by another fantastic meal, this time at East By Northeast, which again had a great atmosphere - all contemporary and cool - and deliiiiicious food. It's owned by the same people who run the place we ate last night, so it was with great trepidation that I asked our waiter whether they by any chance have the same sorbet as Harvest on Fort Pond. Not only did they have it, but it's made there! So the Harvest guys nick it from them!
Oooh la la, dessert was a delight to behold and Max didn't make the same mistake twice - he got himself a serving too and we were both in fizzy citrussy heaven. Mmmmm.
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