Meandering the Country

September 5-12, 2022 Our time in New Jersey was spent exclusively exploring New Jersey’s crown jewel, Cape May.  Cape May County is a south-facing peninsula, located at the very southern tip of New Jersey.  Just to confuse things a little, at the southern end of Cape May peninsula sits the city of Cape May!  It is this city that New Jersey considers to be its jewel.  Wandering around the city, it didn’t take us long to understand why this is such a popular tourist destination. In fact, it was the tourist industry that made this city into what it is today.  Cape May claims to be America’s first seaside resort! Driving through town, you can’t help but fall in love with the Victorian homes lining the streets.  They give Cape May such a quaint ambiance.  Cape May boasts having over 600 authentically renovated Victorian structures, most of them dating back to the mid 1800s.  In 1971, the popular and historic Washington Mall shopping district was closed...

September 2-5, 2022 To break the trip to New Jersey up (and avoid the New York City vicinity), we stopped in southeast New York for a few days.  What we had anticipated to be a few days of catching up with things around the camper turned out to be nothing of the kind!   We stayed at Rondout Valley RV Campground for this Labor Day weekend.  It wasn’t until a couple of days before arriving there that I began thinking about a friend from my days at Iowa State University.  Patrice and I both were Home Economics Education majors with our area of concentration in textiles and clothing.  We also both did our student teaching experience through the Cultural Urban Teaching Experience (C.U.T.E.) program in Kansas City.  Patrice and Dave live in Catskill, NY and I began wondering how far we would be from their home.  It turned out that we weren’t far at all!  We last saw Patrice and Dave 26 years ago when our family took our epic two-week, east coast ca...

August 29 – September 2, 2022 Odetah Camping Resort was home for our visit to Connecticut.  It’s got to be one of our favorite campgrounds!  We’ve stayed at so many, but for the first time we actually took a day off from sightseeing or hiking to just hang out there!   The campground itself has a lot of history.  It’s been in existence since 1905, originally built with cabins for families looking to escape the summer heat from NYC, Boston and other surrounding cities. Entertainers such as Milton Berle performed here!  In 1974, it switched to a Jewish children’s camp.  Penny Marshall was one of the notable alumni who came here during that short period of the camp’s history.  While the children were here, they would work on earning merit badges.  One of the badges was the “heart badge”, which stood for the heart of Odetah.  Finding the heart rock was part of earning this badge!  Soon after the children’s camp closed, it became the cam...