The rest of the Hamptons

Wandering around Southampton looking for the Hertz rent-a-car office gave me the first taste of what the rest of the Hamptons are like, the big villages of Southampton and Easthampton. It’s pretty close to what you see on television, a bit like Beverly Hills transported to the beach. Everyone under 40 is very designer shabby, all flip flops and big sunglasses and $200 t-shirts in horribly bland colours. Everyone is trying to dress designer down. It’s amusing but I’m not buying into it. For starters, I look terrible in billowy grey t-shirts. I like to match. I like colour. I like tailoring. I like to look neat and tidy. I’m going to wear whatever the heck I want, and I don’t care about the rest of you.

Shopkeepers are exceptionally rude. S tells me they are generally pretty cranky this close to the end of the season.

Apart from the shops, there are lots of high-end seafood joints and nannies pushing whining kids around in fancy prams. Oh and it’s a great place to see retro roadsters. Lots of old lavender suited gents driving around in vintage Mercedes convertibles and rollers from the 1950s.

Easthampton is the trendiest of them all, but quite frankly, I didn’t think much of it. There are the usual shops, high-priced restaurants and gelato bars. And it would literally kill these people to say thank you if you hold a door open for them or acknowledge that we’re all breathing the same air today in town. Rude, rude, rude.

Compare this to Sag Harbour. In my first three minutes of stepping off the Jitney and pulling out my map and spinning around in a 360, a local-looking guy asked me if he could help me find something and pointed me in the direction of home for the next few days.

Then there were the lovely guys who sat next to me at the bar while I ate dinner at the New Paradise Café. New Yorkers. Both very impressed that I’m traveling by myself. One has a close friend who is Australian, Peter Lowy, and so has met quite a few Australians over the years. He’s always joked with Peter that he’s so successful in business in New York because of the accent. Before leaving for dinner somewhere else, they asked Howie at the bar to take good care of me.

Then there was the lovely Colombian local who chatted to me for hours and bought me drinks at Murphy’s dive bar in a back-street of Sag Harbour. W (S’ boyfriend) had drawn me a detailed map of where to go to dinner and how to get Murph’s afterwards. Murphs is a one room lean-to of a bar in an old shack in a backstreet of Sag Harbour. It’s such a contrast to the main street, which looks like it’s straight out of a movie set. Yet, anyone and everyone drinks at Murphs. There were the kids who all knew eachother because their parents have summer places here and they’ve spent their holidays in Sag Harbour for as long as they can remember. The locals, like the lovely Columbian and apparently according to S a lot of famous people swing past Murph’s to have low-key drink without all the attention. Before he died, JFK Jnr was often a regular at Murph’s when he was in town.

In town on Sunday morning I also read that Steinbeck lived in Sag Harbour for a time in the 1950s as well as Arthur Miller and Jackson Pollack. Steinbeck wrote the Winter of our Discontent one cold summer in Sag Harbour. He probably had a few drinks at Murph’s with Arthur Miller.

So I spent my days driving around in the Cobalt, walking along the beaches, driving past the most gorgeous homes I’ve ever seen, street after street, swinging into little art galleries and boutiques, checking out the local lighthouse etc. In a word, it was really low-key bliss. Oh and because it’s only $8.99 for a six pack, I bought Caronas and corn chips that I’d crack open in the back garden of S’s place while I told her about my day and watched the sun dip down over the back hedge. But I think the experience would have been very different had I not been staying in Sag Harbour and not staying with locals.

On Sunday I had to take the car back, so I couldn’t join in the sailing, which I think Buddy was a bit miffed about. So I watched them set off and swam out to a pontoon, which I soon found out was a private pontoon. Reaffirmed by the lady who also swam out to the pontoon complete with bathing cap, to ask me if I was a friend of the family’s, because this was their private pontoon after all.

...and that was the Hamptons!