Driving 'Down Jersey'

Trying desperately to catch up on our blog posts.

On the Saturday that Sarah and friends returned from Costa Rica, I went exploring south Jersey, while taking pictures and collecting specimens for an upcoming exhibit I'm curating. Below are some of the pictures I took.

I will be the 1st one to admit that before we moved here I had a very wrong impression of southern New Jersey. I, probably along with most people in the south, just thought of New Jersey as being, horribly polluted to the point of creating a permanent stench and absurdly overcrowded by greasy-haired obnoxious & rude, "Guido's" with annoying accents. Actually, as everyone up here will admit, northern NJ is like that, but the southern part of the state is very different. I'd say as different as South Florida from the panhandle. Like 2 separate worlds. Southern Jersey has lots of agricultural land and is very rural in some parts (though not by southern or western standards), populated by small towns, fishing villages, etc. ~1/5th of the state is covered by a very beautiful and fairly unique habitat called the NJ Pine Barrens, or Pinelands, that is as well know for it's nature as it is for the "Piney's" that live there and their "Piney culture". People from the north look down on the Piney's as back-woods rednecks.

I was taking pictures for the climate change exhibit I'm curating, so my first stop was outside of a nuclear power plant situated on the south shore between an estuary and along the Delaware Bay. This was a beautiful spot with wetlands practically in every direction as far as you could see, except that you could just barely make out Philly on the horizon toward the North.

This picture was taken in a tiny little fishing village appropriately names Bivalve, NJ. It was really only this building, 1 house, and a clam packing company in this town, which is right beside the town of Port Norris - an almost equally small town but important fishing port.

Sea gulls at Port Norris, New Jersey

This picture was taken at a place called Thompson's Beach - a town that doesn't exist any more. There's just a long road through an estuary that ends at a small observation platform. People come from all over the world every spring to witness the migration of birds here to refuel on their way to the Arctic to breed. In fact, the Delaware Bay estuary is home to the 2nd largest stopover point for migrating birds in the western hemisphere. American birding really got started here. John James Audubon spent a lot of time here and there is even a city named Audubon. I've never been much into birding, but I'd love to come see the migration. A lot of amazing birds, including the Red Knot, which flies from the tip of South America to the Arctic and back every year - the longest migration of any species on the planet.

Anyway, I got off topic for a moment. The picture below was taken at Thompson's Beach and is wonderful, real, tangible proof of sea level rise. This was forested dry land in historic times, but has since been slowly inundated by rising seas. You can see scenes just like this all along the south shore of New Jersey.

Cape May Lighthouse, Cape May State Park, Cape May, NJ. This town is on the very southern tip of New Jersey and is a popular tourist and vacation town in the region.

This picture was also taken at Cape May State Park, but on the beach (obviously). This is actually pretty cool - this building and several other like it we bunkers and artillery emplacement built to defend the eastern shoreline and the Delaware Bay during World War II. What's also amazing, is that when these were built, only ~65 years ago, they were located 900 feet inland, and now they are partially covered during high tide. More proof for rising sea levels and extreme shoreline erosion.

I ended the picture-taking portion of the day at Cape May Point and had hot chocolate in the bed of my truck watching the beautiful sunset. It was a really fun and enlightening day.

That thing sticking out of the water right beside the sun is the remains of an experimental concrete shipping boat made during WWI. Only a few were built, but the military scrapped the idea when it turned out they were too slow. I know, I was shocked too.

Well, after sunset, I still had hours before I was supposed to pick up Sarah, Jeanette, Christa, and Jackson from the Atlantic City Airport., so I slowly made my way up the back roads along the resort towns on the barrier islands. Towns like Avalon, Sea Isle City, Ocean City, and Stone Harbor. It was kind of cool to drive through these towns. I know they are over run with tourists during the summer months, but as I drove through them I was practically (and sometime literally) the only one on the streets.