The Beach Offers Strange Bedfellows

What is it about a little town, especially one on the coast, that creates strange retail concoctions. Case in point, in Long Beach there is a shop called Scrapaccino. What might be inside you ask? You could make some assumptions and say scrapbooking accounts for the first syllable and possibly some sort of coffee service to cover the rest of the name. Well, you'd be right on both counts, scrapbooking and espresso, but that's not all. They also offer tanning. I dare you to come up with any way in which those three services tie together...told ya.

That takes us then to Anna Lena's, also in Long Beach, where they not only offer multitudes of cool fabric but they also give quilting classes and have many quilts for sale. But that's not all! They are also THE place to go for a myriad of flavors of homemade fudge. OK, explain that connection to me. It's hard to say which of their offerings pulls in the most traffic.

Then there's Colleen's located in Ocean Park right at the beach entrance. Colleen is all about yarn and knitting and stitchery kinds of products and I think there may be some classes involved there too. Well, she also added a dessert/ice cream bar and more recently put in a full restaurant serving both breakfast and lunch. I can guarantee many who eat there don't knit there.

Then of course, there's the quintessential conglomeration of stuff at Jack's Country Store, on the main drag of Ocean Park. You can shop there for lumber or lemons, pots and pans or pizza, shovels or shortbread, 20-30 different styles of oil lamps or oysters, gas or garbage (well, you actually drop that off, you don't buy it). When you walk in there, you feel like you've stepped back maybe 50 years because I'd swear some of the aluminum wash tubs they have on the top shelves have got that much dust on them.

Anyway, my point is, these unique shop combinations are primarily responsible for what gives small coast towns their charm. You find yourself counting on finding an opportunity to run into these oddball shops just because they are so different from your everyday life and help you to escape for a few minutes from the bleak realities of your work life and all the baggage associated with that. They are definitely worth a few minutes of your time.