Mosquitoland, New Jersey

In order to avoid the holiday traffic, we wanted to find a place to stay over the Memorial Day weekend arriving on Thursday and not departing until the following Tuesday.  After looking at the Thousand Trail parks in New Jersey and seeing what was available, we decided to stay at the Chestnut Lake Campground in Port Republic, New Jersey.

The drive from Lancaster to Port Republic took us through downtown Philadelphia:

We encountered several toll roads and bridges:  $9 just to cross the bridge into New Jersey.  Welcome to New Jersey!

After driving through several small towns and two-lane roads, we arrived at Chestnut Lake Campground.  You know you are in trouble when the campground office welcomes you to their campground with “Hope you have a nice stay and watch out for the mosquitoes!”  And sure enough, they were bad…real bad.  Chuck got 3 mosquito bites while disconnecting the car and this was during the middle of the day.  What was it going to be like at night?

We drove around the campground and decided on site #202.  It was a short and kind of narrow site but did have water and sewer.  Unfortunately, they only have 30 AMP electric, which meant we could only run one air conditioner and it was supposed to be in the high 80’s over the weekend.  Lovely!  Hot, humid and we have to stay inside because of the mosquitoes.

The campground had a nice lake that Chuck would have liked to try fishing but it just wasn’t worth fighting the mosquitoes.  And I didn’t want to stand outside long enough to take any pictures of the lake or our site.  (Sorry!  No pictures here.)  The mosquitoes were so bad nobody else went outside either. 

Since we didn’t want to be cooped up in a one air conditioner motorhome the whole weekend, we started looking for day trip possibilities.  On Thursday evening, we drove to Mystic River, New Jersey, which was a community of houses with canals running through it.  The road ended at Great Bay and across from Great Bay you could barely see the hi-rises from Atlantic City.

There were marshes all along the sides of the road.  (The more marshes, the more mosquitoes!)

When we got back to Port Republic, we decided to check out the local grocery store and found a good ol’ southern store, Dollar General, in this shopping center in New Jersey.

Another consideration for a day trip was to drive to Atlantic City but we had heard some bad reports about Atlantic City and how dangerous it was.  Chuck checked out the RV forums online to see what fellow RVers were saying.  We hated to be this close to Atlantic City and not go see it.   Most of the forums said that if you went there during the day and just stayed on the main roads, you shouldn’t have a problem.   We decided to head down there Friday morning and check it out.  Here is a picture from a distance:

We drove on some of the streets for which the Monopoly board game properties were named after (Atlantic City, Ventor, Pennsylvania, etc.).  And tried to stay off of the back streets. 

Unfortunately, Atlantic City, at least what we saw, was not a pleasant city.  You drive down the main streets and see these big glitzy million dollar hotels and casinos like Trump Taj Mahal and within just a few blocks you are driving through poverty stricken neighborhoods.  Since it was misting rain slightly, we didn’t even drive down to the Boardwalk, one of Atlantic City’s most famous attractions.

In trying to decide where to go next, I remember that the GPS had listed Lucy the Elephant as an attraction.  We drove south out of Atlantic City and almost immediately were in Ventnor City where the streets were lined with fancy summer homes and beach houses.  We found our way to Lucy the Elephant and I got a picture:

Lucy the Elephant is a real big statue of an elephant made of metal (that’s our car at the base of it).  It was interesting but not near as impressive as the real elephants we had just seen the week before at the National Zoo.

By this time, we were starting to get hungry and were about out of gas.  We filled the car up first or rather the service station attendant filled it up.  Now, that was something we had not experienced in about 35 or 40 years.   Apparently, it is New Jersey law.  That’s weird! 

We then looked for something to fill us up.  Being this close to the ocean, we were really in the mood for seafood.  We found a restaurant called Bobby Chez Jumbo Crab Cakes.  When we went inside we found out that is more like a seafood deli bar where most people pick up their prepared seafood and take it home and cook it (kind of like Papa Murphy’s take and bake pizza).  Fortunately, they would cook it there also and you could sit and eat it at a little table and chairs in front of Starbucks.  We ordered 2 jumbo crab cake dinners with a pint of a broccoli type cole slaw.  They gave you more than enough French fries but Chuck could have eaten 3 or 4 of those “jumbo” crab cakes.  Except for the quantity, it was pretty good and at least you got a lot more than what they served at Flagler Fish Co. (our new standard to which quantities of food served are compared).  (See 2/28/12 post.)

After dinner, we headed back home and I tried to decide where our next day trip would be to escape the mosquitos.