Take trips with friends
On traveling with faraway besties and recs for the Hamptons.
In this edition of Let’s Go, with Matt Ortile: tips for the Hamptons and thoughts on long weekends with best friends. Also, I’m teaching a creative writing class in two weeks! More info here.
Two weekends ago, I went to the Hamptons with one of the Rachels. We spent a short 48 hours at a newly revamped hotel called The Sagaponack. There are rooms in the main house, standalone bungalows, and a pool. It’s very cute, residential in feel, and right on the highway. Once they develop a restaurant concept, Rachel and I agreed, it’ll be a perfect pit stop en route to Amagansett or Montauk. Until then, the help-yourself bar—with unlimited Miss Vickie’s chips, freshly baked cookies, and bags of ice to put in the rentable coolers—is more than fine.
Rachel and I spent our time laying on the beach, shopping for vintage furniture, hunting for salads that didn’t cost $30, and catching up. She moved out to Long Island for work some years ago, which means driving to Bridgehampton was easy but meeting up regularly is difficult. (Admittedly, my own hectic work and travel schedules don’t help.) But we make do. One way we cultivate our friendship is by going on these long weekends. Last year, a few weeks before her wedding, I brought her along on a reporting trip to Panama City, where we stayed at the Sofitel Legend Casco Viejo, the capital’s toniest place to stay. I had spoiled her, her husband teased us both at their reception, when I returned her to him after a dance.
It feels silly to say the number: 15 years of friendship. I met Rachel at Vassar—I’m sure in our first semester (I spent a wasteful amount of time crushing on a boy who lived down the hall from her), though she and I grew much closer in our junior year. So much so that we agreed to live together in Manhattan that summer while we worked our internships, and again for our final year on campus. We cohabitated well. She kept bathroom duty and I kitchen. We laugh often about how a crunchy, make-their-own-kombucha housemate of ours hated how I washed our dishes. Rachel, sarcastic: “How dare you use soap.”
In the Hamptons, we did less reminiscing. We had plenty enough to tell each other regarding recent events, how she and her husband were doing, how my work was going. (I promise it was all much less placid than that sentence makes it out to be, but that’s all I’m at liberty to say, for her part and mine.) We chattered until we fell asleep, easy to do as we shared a king bed at The Sagaponack. The bathroom too, and it made me smile to watch her blow dry her hair—scrupulously as ever—as if we were in Terrace Apartment 7 once again, as if a decade had never passed.
Living together and traveling together are quite alike. You undress yourself, literally and figuratively, in the company of others. Rachel and I, in my opinion, have done it well, for which I am grateful. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that she is patient with me. I am a somewhat tiresome travel companion, I admit, a tense “we have lunch reservations at 1:30 p.m.” type, and an utter Dadzilla at the airport.
But we have traveled and lived together multiple times now and, I think, are getting better at it. Granted, we’ve had uneasy moments and conversations, but that’s par for the course when you spend 15 years in each other’s orbit, growing and changing in different ways. It’s up to you and the people you love to navigate your friction hand in hand. Each time Rachel and I share our time like this, I learn how to be a better friend.
All that to say: there are virtues to taking trips with friends. Not a groundbreaking take, I know, but the common horror stories can do a lot to deter you from getting that joint vacation out of a group chat’s realm of ifs. So much of friendship is helped by proximity, and yet the universe insists on pulling us apart from our beloveds. Short of living together—under the same roof, along the same street, or in the same city—traveling with loved ones can do the next best thing: test and bolster your connections, foster new memories, grant you new stories to repeat at reunions or in wedding toasts, and push you to care for each other in unfamiliar lands and waters, literal and emotional. It’s not quite the same, but it’s more than fine.
Let’s Go: to the Hamptons 🚆🇺🇸
The towns of Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, and East Hampton (and Amagansett and Montauk, though they’re not technically “the Hamptons”) are all served by the Long Island Railroad, and all reachable within two to three hours from Brooklyn/Queens’s Jamaica station. It’s a very easy ride, though it can get crowded. When I went, the place was packed with summer-Fridayers with laptops still open, who rudely took two seats for themselves on the train. Do not afraid to challenge them for space; it’s often a monied crowd who have had everything else handed to them. They can spare an aisle seat. A ticket, depending on your stop, will cost roughly $20.
I stayed in Sagaponack, technically a village in the Town of Southampton that is best accessed via the Bridgehampton stop. (Don’t think about it too hard.) I checked into the eponymous Sagaponack hotel and took a large room in the main house. The standalone bungalows were the domain of families who were in the area for a wedding. The on-site pool is a nice option, though Town Line Beach is just a seven or eight minute cycle away—and the hotel has manual and electric bikes you can borrow (as well as beach-ready coolers). There’s not yet a restaurant, but the help-yourself bars are well stocked with canned drinks, coffee, and grab-and-go snacks. For a more full-service option, Topping Rose House in Bridghampton has a Jean-Georges and a “poolside Champagne studio.”
For the morning, I recommend the breakfast sandwich at the Sagaponack General Store (SGS). Fluffy eggs and melted cheese are served in a buttermilk biscuit—you have the option to add or forgo ham—and it is supremely good. After 10 a.m., the line to the counter stretches out the door, but it moves fast because the staff have dozens of pre-prepped sandwiches waiting in the wings.
As a grocer, SGS stocks good-looking locally-farmed produce; so do perennial favorites like Round Swamp Farm and Loaves & Fishes, but SGS is the only one that serves espresso drinks. Those two are good options for lunch; just grab some pre-made food like sandwiches or crab salads in deli containers and take them to, say, Sagg Main Beach. (That said, expect to share the shore with a crowd there, as it has one of the bigger parking lots among the beaches in the area.)
Dinner at Pierre’s is great for people-watching, though the staff does try to turn tables quickly given the spot’s popularity (a strategy at odds with its purported sensibility as a French bistro). Lingering is more welcome at Elaia, where we stopped by for dessert, namely the loukoumades, Greek fried dough balls soaked in honey. If you’re craving Italian, the garden Il Ponte is the place to go; for steak, Bobby Van’s never hurts.
If you have a car, do yourself a favor and check out the thrift shops and furniture stores. Wyeth along the highway was a mid-century modern wet dream; Anna at John Salibello (mostly American and Italian furniture from the 1960s) was extremely lovely and helped my friend Rachel pick out a chair for her office. The Thrift & Treasure Shop of the Animal Rescue Fund (ARF, cutely) has a basement where you can get whatever you can stuff into a bag for $20. I was eyeing a set of six dining chairs, but had to stop myself because I couldn’t get them back to Brooklyn without a car—or a driver’s license, for that matter. But that’s a newsletter for another day.
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housekeeping: i’m teaching another writing class in two weeks
In an attempt to exercise all my literary and craft skills regularly, I am teaching a writing seminar once again. It’s called Curiosity Over Catharsis: An Introduction to Personal Essays at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. It will be conducted over Zoom, so anyone can join from anywhere in the world. It’s on Saturday and Sunday, July 26 and 27, at 2:00–5:00 p.m. ET.
Over two days, we will discuss two myths about the personal essay form—that our story must have an obvious “ending,” and that we write essays to achieve “catharsis”—in order to develop a more sustainable writing practice, one built not solely on the story of our own lives. We’ll read excerpts from works by Nicole Chung, Tajja Isen, Jia Tolentino, and more; and try generative writing exercises to immediately apply what we’re learning. My classes are fun and active, I promise. I hope to see you there! Sign up here. ($175)