On To New Jersey

The weather gods smiled at us, well, a little bit.

After another cold (46) night we woke to clear
skies, the sun shining and a relatively light
breeze. That's looking pretty good, isn't it? And the bridge over the inlet remind us of the Dames Point Bridge in Jacksonville. This is an amazing State Park. Their are two campgrounds, one on either side of the bridge, each with full service hookups and water for the tent camping areas. There is a beautiful marina  with floating docks and over on the beach side, a huge parking lot for day timers to us and a restaurant that's open in the season. As you can tell from our picture this is not the season yet, however there were several others RVs which were scattered around us.

At 8 AM we called office for the ferry from Lewes, DE to Cape May, NJ and made a reservation for our next cruise which sails at 12:45 and better be there 45 minutes ahead of time because we were considered a large vehicle and it was Sunday and the mid day ferries would be full with people going home. Hey, it's not in the season, yet.

That done, we finished our breakfast and decided to visit Rehobeth Beach on the way to the ferry. Over the years we had heard a lot about Rehobeth Beach and how it was such a popular place for people to visit in the summer time, especially for Washingtonians. The main street to the beach was super wide with parking meters that were covered up because - it was't the season. We did didn't walk the boardwalk but it was packed probably because the weather had warmed up considerably. Parking was scarce even for off season and on the way out we found a spot about two blocks after we passed a great looking coffee/bakery shop which we found had OK coffee but over the top bakery goodies.
Our score for Rehobeth on a scale from 1 to 10 would be 5, mainly because for it was just another blah beach town, sort of like a big, crowded Delray Beach.

So here we are at the ferry terminal an hour ahead of time, first in line for the large vehicles which we later that there are two others, one that was behind us at the SP. No problem, we had a little housekeeping to take care of and I had time to let Shadow check out a ferry that was his size. Going across Delaware Bay took about an hour and a half, the seas were calm and Shadow slept most of the way. Susan read her soap programs off her iPad and I talked to a biker couple with a new Harley Limited, the guy in the other RV from the SP and took some pictures which didn't turn out too well. One of my pet peeves these days is that are lots of class for photographers if you have some pricey equipment but there's no classes for a guy with just an iPhone. You would think that are plenty of us using iPhones who would like to be able to take better pictures.


So the ferry docks and now we're in Cape May, NJ.

Without maps I set the GPS for the lighthouse and
within 15 minutes there we are. The lighthouse is absolutely wonderful and majestic even with it's plain Jane white paint job. The surrounding grounds consists of a ramp and deck for watching hawks, a walkover to the beach and a museum  and gift shop and the lighthouse keeper's dwelling. The first lighthouse, 68 feet tall, was built in 1823 and it's location is now under water. The second lighthouse, 78 feet tall, was built in 1847 and was replaced by the present lighthouse because it was poorly constructed. The current lighthouse was first lit on October 31, 1859. It is 157' 6" tall and has 199 steps in the tower's cast iron spiral staircase. In 1936 the original first order Fresnal lens was replaced with a DCB-36 rotating beacon and is visible 24 miles out to sea and flashes every 15 seconds. Wow, that was a lot of steps. The lighthouse is in an area called Cape May Point and from there we drove over to the older Historic Cape May which is full of many, many Victorian homes. In the center of the business district a street has been removed the and all of the shops and businesses open on to a beautifully landscaped walking promenade. And yes, they too have a parking problem and it's not even in the season.

We did find a place to park down by the convention center where the parking meters aren't used until May 1st -that must be when the season starts. A short walk to Zoe's where a late lunch became our dinner. And then to our campground for the night.

Cape May gets an 8 only because it's in the north and is very cold in the winter. If it were down south it would get a 10.