You can take the girl away from the shore...

But you can't take the shore away from the girl.  

I grew up in a place where, if it rained hard enough for more than a day, the ocean met the bay and school was flooded out.  I grew up surrounded by waves, salt air (and water taffy) and, even having been gone for a decade, the smell of a morning by the ocean still welcomes me home in a way that apple pie or turkey or mom's ravioli's must for other people.

The sound of feet falling on an old boardwalk, salt air and heavy breathing drowned out only by lapping water against a boat and gulls overhead.  This was my last run and it was not against the backdrop of the shore that was my childhood stage.  It was beautiful, lit by the subtlety of an early sun and full of the warmth of home.  And it was in Philadelphia.

Down by the Delaware River, on Columbus Boulevard, if you start at Washington Avenue and head toward the new Race Street Pier (where men fish, old women knit, families picnic and children blow bubbles at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge, by the way) you will be rewarded with beautiful wooden beams that fall under your feet like the Ocean City Boardwalk, waves, gulls and boats (parked and moving) and endless views of a clean and shiny Camden (from far away, I suppose anything is).

The terrain is flat until you get to the Ben Franklin Bridge but as I've always said, that uphill is well worth the view from the top and the sigh of relief on the downhill.

Camden falls beneath your feet again with baseball fields (thank you, Rutgers) and another hidden and untouched boardwalk.  There will be a fat fisherman in an empty parking lot hot after catfish.  He operates out of a maroon aged cadillac - older than you (the car and the fisherman) and questionable in the "does this thing actually move" sort of way.

This is a tough run rewarded by the "reach out and touch me" proximity to the USS NJ.  At this old ship, I smile and turn around - goodbye for now old friend - and you are halfway done.  Although this is flat, it's rough, hot and a smack in the face when you realize you're at the base of the bridge and have yet to climb up it.  But again, there is the triumphant view from the top and the sigh of a decline; the river welcomes you back on the Philadelphia side and the water glistens all the while.

This run feels like a hug from home in all of the right ways for those of us who love the shore and are heartened by the subtle give of the boardwalk beneath our feet.