Toby Goodshank Original Art 2025

Life with Chicken and Broccoli

Category: beach

  • Good Times

    Good Times

    We drove down to Rehoboth Beach for James’s baseball tournament, two cars, because that is just how we do it now. We had been to Rehoboth before, but I had apparently forgotten the whole place, including the long strip of stores, restaurants, hotels, and traffic that greets you on the way in. By the time we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express & Suites, a few of the baseball families were already camped out in the lobby. That lobby would become our unofficial clubhouse for the weekend.

    Thursday was our beach day, and after a week of forecasts threatening otherwise, we lucked into perfect weather. We arrived early and set up right in front until the lifeguards paid us two visits. First, they made us take down our tent. Then they confirmed that no, we could not fly a kite either. It was Stephanie’s birthday, though, and we were not about to let a few town ordinances ruin the day. We tried to leave enough room around us for the families who would arrive later. The strangers who set up camp around us did not get that memo.

    Then the tournament started.

    We won one game and lost one. The loss was a game we could have won, though I am fairly sure every baseball parent says that after every loss. A double play ended our comeback and took the wind out of us. Charging us $20 to park after we had already driven four hours felt like a personal insult, but that is travel baseball.

    Saturday was our day. We beat the top team in the tournament, then handled the next one easily, which moved us into fifth place and the winners’ bracket. At the time, every pitch felt important, every at-bat like it might decide the whole weekend. A few days later, I could barely remember most of it.

    What I remember now is everything that happened between the games. Families spread across the hotel lobby. The group growing as siblings and extended family arrived for the weekend. Parents trying, and mostly failing, to keep the boys from sprinting down the hallways. We lost a couple of kids at the beach and then found them again. Some boys overate, some got sunburned, and one or two took too many waves to the head and paid for it later. Mysterious feminine hygiene products surfaced from the sand. The bathrooms were too far away, so everyone made their way into the ocean and pretended it was only for a swim.

    There were nightly walks to Rita’s, where we learned Tim is a vanilla connoisseur. There was a fiercely competitive round of cornhole and the total dominance of Casey and James on the boards. There was a mysterious blue vase, so out of place in the hotel lobby that someone eventually removed it from the premises and gave it a loving new home in Connecticut. There was my service buddy Duke, a rescue dog and my new favorite beach friend. There was the Crooked Hammock Brewery, the humidity finally breaking, and a sunset appearing through the clouds at just the right time.

    And there were the moms who organized the entire weekend so the rest of us could show up, complain about parking, and enjoy ourselves. I am always grateful for that, even when I forget to say it.

    Not the counts. Not the innings. Not who was up with two outs.

    The lobby. The beach. The laughter. The nonsense.

    By Sunday morning, we were still alive in the winners’ bracket, ranked fifth and facing the sixth-ranked CNS All-Stars, a team that had scored more runs than anyone else in the tournament. Our pitching was great, but two balls found the third-base line. I did not get a clean look at the first one. The second was one of those line-hugging shots that curves away into no man’s land just when you think it is going foul. Those two plays cost us four runs.

    We rallied anyway, pulled within one, gave everyone one final dose of hope, and could not finish it. After all the pacing, anxiety, and hoping, we were sent packing around 10:30 Sunday morning. We later found out the team that beat us went on to win the whole tournament. I still cannot decide whether that is supposed to make it hurt less or more.

    That is the agony of being a baseball parent. Every missed chance feels enormous. Every mistake feels like a small tragedy because, for a few hours, their hopes become your hopes too.

    But they are still kids. Everyone needs to take a breath.

    They are caught somewhere between following instructions and disappearing into their own worlds, wanting their coaches’ approval, their teammates’ respect, and their parents’ pride. They almost certainly do not want their fathers talking baseball at them for four hours on the ride home.

    There is a line from The Office I have always loved: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

    I think about that line more than I would like to admit.

    The baseball will fade. I will forget the score, the missed chances, and probably even the names of the teams we played. What I will keep is the hotel lobby, the beach, the blue vase, Rita’s, Duke, the cornhole games, and the boys laughing together into the night.

    As we were leaving, I saw a father in the batting cage with his young son, feeding him pitches while the two of them were completely lost in it. I remembered when James was that small. For a moment, I could see the whole circle of baseball life right in front of me.

    The tournament gave us a reason to go. The time between the games was the reason it mattered.

    I already miss it.

    These are the good times.

  • Aruba with Friends

    Aruba with Friends

    Aruba with friends was a long time coming and a long time in the making.

    I have always felt that traveling with other people usually comes with a certain amount of friction. A few issues. A few inconveniences. A little nonsense here and there. That just seems to be part of the deal whenever multiple families, multiple personalities, and multiple rhythms try to move together in one place.

    But Aruba, at least to me, is one of those rare places that almost cannot be ruined.

    The trade winds do something magical there. They seem to blow through every irritation before it can take root. They lift heaviness off the day. They carry away tension before it has the chance to settle in. Everything feels lighter there. Easier. Softer around the edges.

    And somehow, this trip turned out even better than I imagined.

    Maybe that is part of getting older. You slowly begin to understand that the real treasures in life are not places at all, but people. Even the most beautiful setting in the world becomes a little less beautiful if there is no one beside you to witness it. Paradise without companionship is still lovely, but it is incomplete. There is a deeper joy in sharing adventures with people you love.

    That is what this trip felt like.

    There is something almost childlike in introducing people you care about to a place that already means something to you. It is like watching your children open presents on Christmas morning. Your own joy is there, of course, but it is magnified by theirs. You get to experience the gift twice. Once as your own memory, and once again through the delight of someone else discovering it for the first time.

    Aruba is a place where you do nothing, and somehow that becomes everything.

    So much of life at home is motion. Constant motion. We are always going somewhere, planning something, fixing something, driving someone, checking a calendar, answering a message, or moving on to the next obligation. Life can begin to feel like an endless list of duties, even when it is full of blessings.

    And then Aruba interrupts all of that. What are we doing today? Nothing.

    We walk. We eat. We sit in the pool. We sit on the beach. We drift and bob in the ocean. We talk about everything and anything. Like Kevin Malone, we dream big and then we double it. We let the wind touch our faces and the sun warm our skin. There are no real plans. No excursions. No need to fill the hours so we can say we made the most of them. No bikes. No quads. No party buses.

    Of course, people can do all of that if they want to. Many do. But for me, the great secret of Aruba is that if you try too hard to conquer it, you miss what it is trying to give you.

    To sit there for hours, almost like a ten hour meditation in the sun, while the wind moves over you again and again, as if it is trying to smooth out the inner life you brought with you. The point is to relax so deeply that you begin to remember who you are underneath all the rushing. To let the moment be enough.

    After enough hours like that, you begin to wonder why anyone ever leaves a place once they find it. Or maybe, more honestly, you begin to wonder why the rest of life cannot feel this simple.

    What also made this trip so special was the kind of people we were with.

    There was no competition between us. No subtle scorekeeping. No trying to outdo one another. No performance. Just families trying to grow well together. Just people trying to raise their children with love, attention, and presence. Just friends trying to build lives that carry forward the good things they were given as children, while hopefully making those lives even a little better for the ones coming after them.

    It matters to be with people who understand that being present is more important than being impressive. People who care about the texture of family life. People who know that the small moments are often the big ones in disguise.

    We also do not judge each other, and that matters more than people realize. If one family wants to do their own thing for a while, that is fine. If someone wants more beach and someone else wants more pool, that is fine too. There is no resentment, no weird pressure, and no keeping score. Everyone should be allowed to enjoy the trip in their own way and find out what doing nothing looks like for them.

    Maybe that is part of why it worked so well. The right place, the right people, and the right expectations.

    In the end, that is what made Aruba with friends so good. Not just the island itself, but getting to share it with people we care about in a way that felt easy, natural, and right. Sometimes it takes a long time for things to come together. Sometimes the group gets smaller. Sometimes plans fall away before the right one finally takes shape.

    And maybe that is how it was supposed to happen.

    Because once we finally got there, it felt simple. It felt peaceful. It felt like one of those experiences that reminds you what actually matters.

  • Review: The Jersey Shore – Diamond Beach, NJ (Part 1: Hotel & Vibe)

    Review: The Jersey Shore – Diamond Beach, NJ (Part 1: Hotel & Vibe)

    What can be said about the Jersey Shore? For better or worse, my impression was shaped early on by a little MTV show called Jersey Shore. I thought it was a carnival side-show hookup spot for young Italians trying to catch every survivable STD before summer ended.

    My first trip down didn’t really change that view. I had to come back a few times to get my mind right. We went to Wildwood Crest—Exit 0—the very end of the Garden State Parkway, the end of the line. We stayed in the Diamond Beach area, a tiny sliver of shoreline just before Cape May.

    After going over the iconic E-ZPass bridge, then an inlet stretch or two, you make your way into a different mindset. It’s the kind of place where the road is policed by the Jersey Gods who nobody dares defy. The speed limit is 25, and everyone drives 25 or less. I spent a week there and only saw one police SUV. What kind of law-abiding madness is this? I felt like the Outlaw Josey Wales doing 30, just waiting for the Wildwood PD to swarm in.

    Driving 24 mph, we arrived at Icona Diamond Beach, a boutique hotel that had once been problematic during my first visit. They’ve since transformed it into something completely new. The core of what it was is still there, but this lipstick made the pig completely lovable and livable for our 5-day excursion.

    The rooms, I believe, are all suites. Ours was nicely appointed, though the bedroom area was tight. My wife and I had to do the boardwalk shuffle to get past each other, and sharing one bathroom with four people gets tricky as the kids grow. Thankfully, our daughter stayed with her Mima and Aunt, which helped.

    Still, the tight quarters sparked some memories—back to earlier trips when the kids were little and the space didn’t feel quite so cramped. That wave of nostalgia hit hard. How quickly it all moves. How every age holds something magnificent. I tried to store it all away on that mental shelf where the best moments live, while quietly dreading how much slips away with time.

    The hallway was a long run down the length of the hotel, and the pattern made me feel like I was at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There are historical photos lining the hallway, and I was looking for a party with Jack Nicholson at the beach with that wild Joker smile.

    The hotel employs young people from all over the world, it seems. The staff feels more like they would on a Caribbean island than in New Jersey.

    After breakfast, we’d make a quick visit back to the room to get ready for the day. The walk to the beach is great. It’s a fair distance from the hotel to umbrella city. Once you get to the end of the composite deck walkway that runs adjacent to the beach bar, I flip my flops into the air and plant my feet in the hot, warm sand. It seems like they brush it out each night, creating a fluffy step for me each day.

    I enjoy the little walk and feel the hot sun on my face, causing me to squint like Clint Eastwood staring down an adversary in any Wild West exploit.

    The staff helps you set up any number of chairs, lounges, umbrellas, and towels you need for the day. I’m always a fan of the efficiency in getting this done, complete with their cordless power drill to dig out a place for the umbrellas each day.

    Then we set up our chairs and sit. We sit and enjoy the all-excellence that is going to the beach. The warm air, constantly stirring and flowing over your body. The sounds of summer—fun, seagulls, kids, cocktails, mocktails and waves crashing forever. The shells and sand being turned into fine elegance, millennium after millennium, as the circular waves crash down and out.

    It’s always so amazing how quickly time can move and how tired you can get doing nothing all day. It doesn’t feel the same as sitting at home and watching shows that leave you deflated. A day at the beach leaves you feeling invigorated, closer to God, and with a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know what was accomplished, but I felt like I had put in a day of work.

    Vacation work.

    Sitting around with my family and two stowaways that joined us on our trip, I felt renewed under the energy of the plasmatic sun. Taking time to enjoy this flow of time, surrounded by the people that I love. Thinking of the people that I’ve lost and inviting them to join us.

    I didn’t expect to fall for the Jersey Shore, but somewhere between the wind, the waves, and watching my family lounge in the sun, it got me. It’s funny how doing nothing can leave you feeling so full. We didn’t conquer anything. We didn’t need to. We just showed up, stuck our toes in the sand, stayed present and let the days take us.

    Final Verdict:  8.15/10  (Aruba Light)