Where I live in NJ, we don't have any gorges or spectacular falls like that, but we do have our share of fossils. When I was a teenager the County built a park and dug out a couple of large pond/lakes. This is in the Shark River area, the actual site of the underlying story for Jaws, so it was all marl. A friend and I used to go the park and climb around on the hills of spoils from the ponds getting a nice gooey black mud all over us in the process. Then, one day, one of us, think it was my friend, got stuck, good, by something sharp in the mud. It was a shark tooth. We spent a lot of time screening the mud and found thousands of shark teeth. Ended up using them in a project for Boy Scouts.
Anyhow, we took the nicest samples to the County Museum and the geologist there kept them for about a month to evaluate them. He told us they ranged in age from 6 to 10 million years old and the local paper, a real rag even then, even did a story on it. Thankfully, they didn't want to do a photo of us screen that mud!
That's so neat! I never realized that NJ had fossils. But the state sure does have a lot of interesting things no one seems to know about.
Ocean Grove is a very interesting town. One day while we still lived in NYC, Bill & I visited the place. We walked around the town and were in time for a bell-ringing concert at the big auditorium in the center. Then we strolled along the boardwalk and had lunch at a lovely Victorian house on a shady side street. No alcohol is allowed in this town, and all the residents are part of a religious community. Many live in interesting tent houses. The auditorium in the center of town is an interesting place, too. I marveled at the architecture.
Ocean Grove, New Jersey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The New Jersey Pine Barrens have fascinated me ever since I was a small child, before the Atlantic City Expressway was built, and we took a meandering route
through them from Philadelphia to Cape May, complete with Burma-Shave signs. Anyone remember them? John McPhee wrote a fascinating book about the Pine Barrens.
Pine Barrens (New Jersey) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Another interesting phenomena are the cedar lakes. The cedar trees around them make them tea-colored, but the water is pure and sweet, and they provide great swimming. At lest they did, back in the '60s. I sure hope they are not all polluted now.
Near Atlantic City in Margate is Lucy the Elephant.
Lucy the Elephant When I was a kid, this oddity stood in a field, abandoned and absolutely fascinating to me. It has been restored, and you can take a short tour.
Then, of course, there's Cape May, where I spent many childhood vacations.
Cape May, New Jersey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The town is at the southern tip of the state and is actually below the Mason Dixon Line, even though the bulk of NJ is considered a northern state. When I was a kid, the town was very segregated with even certain beaches delegated to either blacks or whites. Out at Sunset Beach, there's a sunken ship just offshore that has been slowly breaking apart over the years. That always fascinated me.
S.S. Atlantus And it was fun to search the beach for Cape May diamonds, which are actually small bits of quartz made clean & smooth & transparent by the waves.
Cape May diamonds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Near Cape May, in Rio Grande, NJ, is Menz restaurant with the weirdest, most eclectic collection of all sorts of things, including taxidermed (is that a word?) 2-headed calves and such oddities. The food is OK, but the decor is the must-see part.
In another direction, we used to hike from the Weis Ecology Center.
Introduction Now I see it's closing, though it says you can still park there and hike in the Norvin Green State Forest, which adjoins the ecology center's land. There's a place at the top of a mountain where you can look out over miles of rolling green hills and see the tallest buildings of Manhattan on a clear day.
Another great place to hike is right over the George Washington Bridge from Manhattan, then north on the Palisades Parkway to one of the scenic overlooks, where there's a trail along the top of the Palisades, cliffs overlooking the Hudson River far below. Numerous places take you down to a trail alongside the river, though we did that once, and part of the trail was big boulders that were hard to negotiate, and the climb back up was literally breathtaking. At the NJ/NY state line is a place to pull off the parkway with a generous parking lot and a small restaurant serving fast food -- or at least it was there last I visited years ago.
My point here is that NJ is more than just the Meadowlands outside NYC. There's a lot of scenic, wild areas that no one ever thinks about.
