Many Glen Ridgers had a busy summer including, from left, Emily and Chloe Sherry with their mom, Lisa, who vacationed in Virginia.
Another summer gone; just like that.
But although the season, dog days and all, is over, while it was here, did you cross anything off that bucket list? Or maybe you did something you just have to do every summer? At the Glen Ridge Community Pool last week, here is what sun bathers had to say.
“Was there anything we didn’t do?” Lisa Sherry said. “We go to Cape Cod every year with my in-laws and we did again this summer. Every year, we also go to Virginia, to Manssanutten. It’s a Four Seasons Ski Resort. We’ve been going with my family since I was little.”
One of Lisa’s summer plans did not pan out. While at Cape Cod, she was supposed to meet a childhood friend from Texas, but it was raining.
“That was sad,” she said. “She’s at the bottom of the Cape and we’re nearer the top. She didn’t feel comfortable driving in the rain.”
Mike D’Aries brought his two children to the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, in Flushing Meadows, Queens. It was his first time attending the matches, too.
“My kids are taking tennis lessons and I thought it would be good to show them the professionals playing,” he said.
For the Fourth of July, he went to see a friend and her family. They had not gotten together for several years. That same weekend, he visited another friend, too.
“It’s past-Covid time,” he said. “It’s like everyone was in a fog for 5 years and now they’re back to doing things.”
Julia Ruskin also visits Cape Cod every summer.
“We go the same two weeks in July and stay in a cottage on a private beach,” she said. “It’s pretty magical.”
Julia has been going there since she was a baby. There are photographs of her in diapers on the same beach and now she is taking her children.
“My kids went to day camp before and after the Cape,” she said. “It’s freedom to them. They had the quintessential camp experience: swimming, archery, eating ice cream. And at the end of summer, the kids have competitions for two days. I’ve been trying to relax, so we came here to the pool.”
Every summer, Brian Arbour and his wife try to have a year’s worth of date nights in two weeks while their son is off to sleep-away camp.
“We usually go to dinner at Mesob,” he said. “It’s an Ethiopian restaurant on Bloomfield Avenue, in Montclair.”
The diners, he said, are served a large platter of an assortment of vegetable and meat dishes which is eaten with a traditional flatbread called injera.
“I get the collard greens,” Brian said. “They’re always excellent.”
His son does not like Ethiopian food and that is why the parents visit this restaurant in the summer.
“I like the summer,” Brian said. “I’m a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in New York, and didn’t have to commute or go to the office.”
But classes, he said, had started the day before and summer was over now.
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