every couple of years i price out various companies just to see if i can save some money. njm was going to charge me way more than some others. have heard very mixed things since they opened it up to everyone in the state and now advertise just as much as your geicos and allstates and state farms.

my grandparents had a house in elmora hills and i spent a ton of time in warinanco growing up. that part of the park is indeed a hidden treasure in the springtime.

it's been this way for a while now. it still has its rough edges, and honestly probably always will. but it's way, way, way improved over its nadir in the late 1990s.

jersey city marathon/half is april 23rd.

compuscore usually has most of the races that are organized in jersey, as they do the timing for almost all of them. not a half of full/halfs anymore. most races i see these days are like 5-10k's or just fun runs and stuff.

the jughandles on route 22 send their regards. especially the washington ave one.

common refrain from a lot of groups of expats here in the states. people like trump and desantis have strength in florida because the cubans, venezuelans, and colombians view anyone who isn't ultra hard right conservative is a communist who's out to get them.

we are several steps ahead of a lot of other states (especially since many of them purposefully make it as difficult as possible to get the benefits you're entitled to) but things are still more difficult than they should be. unemployment is the biggest offender in this (their website is like 20 years out of date at this point) but other facets of state government lag hard.

based on most of the new construction i've seen everywhere else in the city, it won't be. it will be the same cookie cutter bs that gets thrown up everywhere. at this point the only places you see "interesting" facades are usually when they redevelop historic buildings and they try to keep the historic facades.

this is a good reminder, and also a stark reminder about how badly the state sometimes does with promoting programs that exist to help its citizens. nj does a lot of good stuff for its residents, but hides it in difficult to navigate programs that you need help with knowing how to apply for and use the benefits your taxes are paying for.

it's a solid dividing line if you plan to charge more for rides in and around the shore.

i mean, just because it's only a few places doesn't mean it's not a chain. it's just a small one.

i think a lot of chain restaurants have gone to shit in the pandemic. prices for crappy food have gone thru the roof.

i'd love to get some pictures of bridgewater commons from its heyday in the late 80s/early 90s, especially when they had each level kinda themed in terms of how fancy the stores on that level were (commons collection, etc. i wish i remembered what the other ones were called) and the three story escalator that they took out when they built the new elevators, etc.

you are 105% correct, red bank is the shore, which is its own region.

hind and fore in bridgewater is very good, and if you don't mind a bit of a ride, chester meat market in chester is also excellent.

and it will continue because no one wants to ever do any of the things that would make the taxes actually go down:

• consolidate municipal governments, police services (ideally to a county level), school districts (each tiny little town does not need it's own k-8 and then pay extra for send-receive to another district's high school), and others. it can't just be one of these things, it has to be all. you need to have fewer mayors, councils, administrative staff, and having police forces at higher levels would better spread out the cost of salaries for cops.

• more tax sources than just the property tax. other places in the country get pieces of the sales tax to fund municipal budgets. can't do that in nj. doesn't help all towns evenly (would be more of a boon for places with big downtowns and shopping) but it would also encourage such development.

• modify or kill the fucking farm exemption thing. it's basically an exploited joke at this point. every single rich person who has a small apiary or grows a few christmas trees on their property and thus pays way less in taxes is more that everyone else has to pay to make up the difference. budgets are what they are. either raise the money level high enough where it helps actual farmers but can't be as easily exploited or kill it and replace it with something more useful.

but given that we live and die by our precious home rule in this state, none of this will ever happen, so we all just keep getting stuck paying more for property taxes every year.

it depends. i live in bedminster. the school here is great, but we could just as easily be part of somerset hills regional and still have our actual school and have our kids go to bernards hs in the normal way and not on a send-receive which costs more money.

yes. they've extended the anchor deadline several times. today is indeed the very last day. file if you qualify.

i'm honestly not a major hard roll fan, so i always opt for a bagel. plain or jalepeno usually. the place i like puts too much salt in their everything mix for me to enjoy it. gets too salty between the taylor ham, added salt, and cheese plus the coating on the bagel itself.

thank unchecked rampant development in the 1980s and 1990s for most of that. the road network that exists around here was fine for the levels of traffic and devleopment that existed until then, when the children of retiring farmers did not want to continue that business and developers were paying through the nose for land, so all that farmland got sold, overdeveloped with sprawl, and now here we are. and it's not changing. major new freeway level development is pretty much going to be dead in new jersey forever at this point. nimbys will kill all of it as they killed the somerset freeway and many other projects.

the motel's restaurant. most of the motels along the crest had a coffee shop style restaurant on their top floors or roofs that served breakfast and lunch. idk how many of them still operate.

terminal c has three levels because they have two ticket counter levels and the carousel level. terminal a just has the two.

it was below it. if you look at the model where the lower roadway is, that is the arrivals level where the carousels are. the parking was below that.

including when there was parking under the terminal building. which lasted until the wtc attack in 1993. i remember going there as a kid when we'd go to pick up my dad when he flew in and parking under there. those were also the days you could walk all the way down to the gates as long as you went thru the metal detector. a lot has changed.

that's because they're going to be replacing the current air train. the new one will have a better connection to the new terminal.

damn those eggs look amazing. i'd consider taking a ride out to get some. what would you charge for some eggs?