The family and I recently got back from a week at the Beach, and since we went somewhere new this year it occurred to me that I now have some potentially useful comparison between different beaches that we've visited.
This was our first trip to Sandbridge. We've gone to Avalon (Jersey Shore) in the past, and most recently we've been going to Ocean Isle, NC.
Avalon, Stone Harbor, etc. is similar in terms of drive time (it's about 5 hours away the way we go), and has the benefit of being able to take the Cape May-Lewes Ferry and the Chesapeake Bay bridge to minimize the amount of driving on 95 and in NJ, but it's expensive (and a little snooty) due to the fact that it's easily reachable by those from the NYC metro and it's less crazy than Wildwood. It also requires you to buy beach tags for each person (basically a daily/weekly direct beach access tax), and the water tends to be fairly cold. The proximity to Wildwood's boardwalk is nice, and everyone should visit Wildwood at least once. Between the old 50's-style motels along the beach and the real-deal boardwalk and the people watching, it's so awesomely... Jersey. It's also fairly close to Atlantic City, if gambling is your thing. It's also close to a lot of great restaurants, especially good family-owned Italian, etc. and a lot of stuff is in walking distance, which is nice. My wife reminded me that the car watching can be pretty interesting too. Our last visit here was in 2006. My wife's family used to go here fairly often because they have family in the area, but in 06 we were able to visit here and Ocean Isle back to back (wife's first visit to Ocean Isle) and she decided she liked Ocean Isle way better, convinced her family to join us there the next time we went to the beach, especially once she found that we could get a similarly sized place on first or second row at Ocean Isle for what it costs to get a place 4 blocks from the beach in Avalon.
Ocean Isle is a little spit of land on the southern tip of NC between the Intra-Coastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean, and the beach faces almost due South. It's great if you like laid-back, mostly residential beach (few or no resorts) and mainly go to the beach to hang out on the beach, rather than do other things. Not to say that there aren't things around to do, it just involves a 10-15 minute drive back inland or about 30 minutes to North Myrtle Beach. However, that means you have to be ok with cooking at the house most nights, because there aren't a lot of restaurant options close-by. It is North Carolina though, so it's possible to get fresh shrimp and good BBQ! The ICW is also large enough here to do boating, tubing, and waterskiing. My stepmom's family has been going here for a long time, and I first visited in college. We've been back I think 4 or 5 times total, most recently in 2011. Ocean Isle is 6+ hours away depending on how bad things are on 95, so it's definitely a hike, but I think it's worth the drive as an alternative to the Outer Banks.
This year, we ended up at the Sanctuary, which is the only big Condo/Resort unit on Sandbridge, VA, which is about 30 minutes south of Virginia Beach proper, and usually considered Virginia's Outer Banks.
We chose Sandbridge this time because we were a little late in looking for a place and there wasn't a lot available at Ocean Isle, and since a good portion of our usual beach crew (my dad and stepmom, the sisters) weren't available and therefore there would be fewer people to share the cooking duties, we wanted to see if we could find a place that was closer to us and with a few more restaurants nearby. At least, that was the thought. On the good side, Sandbridge is a lot like Ocean Isle, laid-back, mostly residential, with nice beaches and warm water, and the condo was nice. The kids made good use of the pool when they weren't on the beach, and there were grills available in the common area. On the bad side, Sandbridge has even less nearby than Ocean Isle due to the meandering route that one must take to get back toward VA Beach, meaning that you're going to be driving at least 20 minutes to get to most restaurants, shopping, etc. There is one pretty decent local restaurant called Sandbridge Island Restaurant, Raw Bar and Pizza that we unfortunately didn't discover until our last night, but we were all pretty underwhelmed by the restaurant across from our Condo, Baja.
It also appears that a lot of the true oceanfront places at Sandbridge are fairly small. It seems like a lot of the older places haven't been razed and replaced with houses 3x the size (yet) like they have in a lot of beach communities, so there's lots of cute old cottages and lofts that might be ok for one small family or a couple, but the route that we usually take of getting a single house that is big enough for 4-5 couples plus several kids doesn't appear to be an option unless we're willing to be a bit of a walk from the beach since the larger ocean front places are exacting a premium due to the demand vs. the limited supply.
Also, we went up to Virginia Beach one night in order to check out the "boardwalk"... For folks who know what a real boardwalk is like and were expecting something like Atlantic City, Ocean City, or Wildwood, this was a major disappointment. VA Beach's "boardwalk" is basically just a concrete walkway between the hotels and their affiliated restaurants along the beach. No boards on this walk, no taffy shop, no junk shops, no fried food, not even much in the way of people watching. I will say that Chicho's, the dive bar pizza place a couple of streets back from the beach that we found when everyone was starting to get hangry, had amazing pizza.
Travel time: On the way down, we left later than we probably should have (10:30AM) because I wasn't exactly sure how long it would take, and we couldn't check in to the place until 3pm. Including a stop at Sonic for lunch at my daughter's suggestion, we didn't get there until closer to 5pm, so without stops, this was a 6 hour trip. We probably could have cut 45-60 min off of this by getting on 95 in Dumfries instead of Woodbridge and by leaving earlier and having a plan of what to do to kill time if we got there before we were allowed to check in, but it's not really a headline that Saturday beach traffic sucks. On the way back, we timed it about perfectly, left at 9am, and with one stop, did it in just over 4 hours.
I'm thinking that next time I will take a page from a co-worker, and find a hotel to stay at on Friday night so that we can drive down Friday instead of Saturday to avoid the traffic.
