Black Friday at the Beach

2024-11-29
NJ

We started out in the morning, headed to Roebling Museum in Roebling, NJ. We had called ahead to make sure that they were open on Black Friday, but when we arrived they were in fact closed. Later inspection of their social media showed that there they were closed, but apparently the person we talked to felt that the museum should be open (although obviously they themselves weren't working, of course).

Leaving the closed museum for another day, we continued on to Long Beach Island where we stopped by the New Jersey Maritime Museum. They had a number of displays of the various artifacts pulled from ship wrecks off the coast of New Jersey as well as other artifacts from old boats. There's an entire room dedicated to the SS Morro Castle, an ocean liner that burned in 1934 off the coast of New Jersey, likely due to arson. It was a disaster on several levels, killing 137 passengers and crew. On the brighter side, there were also fun exhibits on antique diving gear, ship's carpenter tools, and even ship's knees. There are also prehistoric fossils recovered from the inter-continental shelf off the New Jersey coast.

While on LBI we went and saw the Barnegat Lighthouse. It was closed for the day, but it was still quite picturesque. The jetty was surprisingly crowded considering the strong wind that day. The Feels Like temperature (invented in Canada, where I guess it seldom feels like the current temperature) was likely in the 20's. We didn't stay long before retreating to the relative shelter of the car, and heading to the Grand Hotel in Cape May where it only took two tries to get a room and key that worked together.

The hotel was about a mile from downtown Cape May so we took our first opportunity to head down there and get some supper. We bundled up against the wind and the cold, and after supper we went to a local craft fair that was running that night just a few more blocks away. It was small so we covered all the shops in relatively short order and then it was time to go back to the hotel and warm up. The hotel was surprisingly crowded, and indeed the town had many more people than we expected. We really were expecting a ghost town, but then there would have been fewer shops and restaurants open if it was empty so it's a trade-off.