After entering the United States through Lebec, we traveled back to where we started our caravan, Bar Harbor Maine. There we attended a family event took a tour of the local islands and slaughtered quite few more lobsters.
After we left Bar Harbor we traveled down to New Jersey. Unfortunately, our route took us over the George Washington Bridge in New York. This is an experience we shall not repeat.
We eventually ended up on the Jersey Shore, just north of Atlantic City. This is where we discovered that the Atlantic City Boardwalk does not permit dogs. Ok, Atlantic City – you lose. We spend no money and cut our visit short. Judging by what we saw in Atlantic City you go for the Casinos and little else. Maybe the beaches (also not dog friendly) are ok. We don’t know and won’t find out.
We found a little tourist trap village name Smithville not to far from our campground. Now we don’t feel there is anything wrong with tourist traps and some of our best stops have been obvious tourist traps. Smithville had good restaurants and lots of places to walk Ginger, so it quickly became a favorite stop for us – having dinner at Fred and Lucy’s no less than 3 times.
After that we moved further down to Cape May. There we found Wildwood which is a collection of coney-island style piers along a large beach. Most importantly the beach was dog friendly. What else could you ask for, fried Oreos and a dog friendly beach?
We liked the Cape May area to the point we cancelled our reservations in Virginia and elected to stay at Sea-Pines RV resort until it is time to return to Hershey PA. for the annual RV show. We will depart Sea-Pines Thursday morning.
Cape May boasts a winery. Being Californian, we decided to go check it out. This was quite an operations with large buildings and a rollicking restaurant. Much to our surprise, they don’t have tastings, but you can buy flights of $26.00 a flight. So we bought flights of wines we thought we would like and since the restaurant was dog friendly, we decided to have lunch there.
The lunch was quite good, the wines less so. Since we paid for the flights, we waived our rule we always buy something at winery where we taste.
The Poker Run
The seasonals at Sea-Pine Thousand Trails came up with a Labor Day Event amongst themselves: a Poker Run. Apparently, many of the seasonals chipped into a common pot and then would go around and collect cards with the winning hand would getting the pot.
The first we learned of it was when first station to collect cards was in the same aisle as our Motorhome. We heard a commotion outside and looked and we were surrounded by 50+ golf cards and two pickup trucks.
“It’s ok”, explained one of the pickup truck drivers, “it identifies as a golf cart”.
The golf carts, full of people with assorted beverages were going point-to-point collecting cards in envelopes and what appeared to be jello shots.
“I’m the designated driver.”, proudly proclaimed one early-teen golf cart pilot.
It was a long, rolling, raucous party that ended in a pot-latch near the front of the park.
A good time was had by all the participants and the interested observers (us). Apparently this was the second year they had done it.
Ferry
Just for a lark, on our last full day, we took ferry ride from Cape May to Lewes Delaware. This is a large car ferry and takes around an hour. It is very dog friendly, allowing dogs inside the cabin with a couple crew members expressing their feelings that they prefer dogs as passengers over children.
Lewes is an older town, quite affluent, and pretty interesting. We walked around the tourist trap area and admired some of the houses that were selling for well over a million each.
The next day we bid farewell to Cape May and New Jersey.
Out feeling was Cape May was worth a visit, but the rest of New Jersey was kind of not interesting. I am sure the locals with their beach houses on the jersey Shore were happy, but it just wasn’t for us.