I thought I’d better get my blog entry for our middle of the August trip to Avalon, Stone Harbor, Sea Isle City, Strathmere and Ocean City, NJ  done to catch up! Just yesterday, Oprah Winfrey, her companion Stedman and her pal Gayle were in Stone Harbor! It’s really a nice, quiet resort area. Sean read where Stedman is from that area too. Perhaps they were visiting family! They sure drew a lot of attention.

So back to my post; we were looking for a place in New Jersey where we hadn’t stayed and ran across a nice looking hotel in Avalon. It was only one night, but we make the most of our trips, so we made a reservation.

It was right near a nice beach, but before 5 you needed a beach tag and they only gave us 2 of them. So we waited until after 5 as we were resting up anyway. When we were little kids, no one would stay on the beach after 3 and nowadays, there were a lot of people on the beach later on.

Where we stayed. We had absolutely the best weather, no humidity and glorious sunshine!

There’s Sean there enjoying the waves

Before we checked in, we had some time to kill, so we headed down to Stone Harbor. Of course it was night and day compared to April when we had been there last! We stopped at the bird sanctuary like we did in April. It was indeed greener, but not much to see, only a few birds flew over.

The hibiscus were pretty though

We found a few caches along the way, like at the lifesaving station

See the cache!

The people near a cache had a sweet public garden.

There was a cache along this lovely sandy trail to the beach

A kayak rider

The blimp made its way up the coast

That evening we hit a place for dinner where you sat on picnic tables and ate out of Styrofoam containers.  Linguine must be their specialty and the guys ordered that-way overpriced for what you get! I decided to try the shrimp salad-hello, where is a dinner portion of shrimp salad? Think I had one ice cream scoop of it. I don’t see what the attraction is as I was glad to get off that picnic bench. The place was really crowded. Guess we ordered the wrong thing.

I walked over 1/2 mile with a bad toe and back to find a cache on a walk way near the beach. It was no where to be found! Had to have Sean go get the car from the main drag of Avalon I was so wiped out!

Sean decided to drive to Sea Isle later by himself and woke Brian and me up when he got in! That usually does it for me if I am sound asleep and get woken up.

The next day we headed back to Stone Harbor and had Mack’s pizza. Now that was delicious! We looked for a cache near a gazebo and just couldn’t locate it. There was a cache at the same place in April, but now it was moved because of the storm damage.

Sean decided to dip his toes in the Atlantic and he was not disappointed!

We then headed to Sea Isle City. We mainly found a cache here and went to James’ Saltwater Taffy!

We stopped at Strathmere to get a ‘virtual cache’ called ‘Beach of Dreams’.  The person who put this here lost his house and just keeps adding ornaments to the area.

Just got a Stone Harbor tie-dyed shirt too! Tie dye was never this nice when I was younger.

Our final stop was Ocean City. It was pretty crowded. Sean took a walk up the boards. I had my broken toe, so I had to be careful walking too much. The Crocs really saved me!

We bought ice cream cones and found one more cache in a hotel before we left. The assistant manager is a cacher and came out and gave me a travel bug to pass along. I went back to the car and retrieved some nice swag for his cache.

So we just couldn’t leave New Jersey and go home, no we had to stop at Smithville Village, a quaint place with little shops and restaurants. We needed to eat dinner and we all chose breakfast food. It was getting late and it was going to close. There were a few caches there as well.  The first cache was near a gazebo. We looked and looked. Had trouble with those kind before. I even went into the cheese shop and asked the sales person and he looked at me cross-eyed.

The other one was across the street in an old cemetery. I had Sean try and lead us. We walked all over a parking lot, but I said I think we should go down the road a bit. Yes, there it was. The cache was suppose to be in a little wooded spot behind the cemetery. We found a nice pile of wood and took it apart-no cache! It was getting dark and the mosquitoes were bad, so we left.

Here are a few shots of Smithville

The end