Category: Trip

Ocean City is a seaside resort in southeastern New Jersey. It’s known for its family friendly atmosphere, and somewhat remarkably has never allowed the sale of alcohol (since it was founded 140 years ago)! We’ve spent the last two nights here.

The beach is about 10 miles long, and has a wide wooden boardwalk extending for about 3 miles. It’s lined with dozens and dozens of shops and attractions, and the entire place is full of people and incredibly busy.

The above photo by the way is KLS’s reaction when the Atlantic water splashed over her feet. Despite extreme temperatures today, the ocean was very cold and almost no one was swimming!

We had a hotel virtually on the boardwalk and spent much of our time here walking back and forth. Today is was dangerously hot (bordering 100F) so we took a siesta in the afternoon to wait until evening when the boardwalk really comes to life.

Almost everything on the boardwalk stays open until very late, and the crowds seemed to double as the sun began to set.

Once it’s dark and the lights start to come on the lines at the food shops are twice as long as they were during the day. There’s a slight night air chill from the ocean, but not enough to affect the long lines at the ice-cream shops.

The arcades and mini golf places start hopping (I played a Rush pinball machine!) and buskers are out in force. Kids run around with light toys and today we even saw Santa and Dr Strange posing with tourists for photos!

The lights on the rides at the amusement parks (there are two on the boardwalk!) are dazzling and the parks are so packed it’s difficult to even walk through them. Here’s a closer look at that intriguing rollercoaster you can see in the above pic:

I didn’t ride it, but apparently it’s one of the best in the USA. And it’s only about 100 feet from the waves!

We’ve enjoyed our brief stay here by the sea, especially the boardwalk after dark. To think that a few weeks ago we’d never even heard of Ocean City! Another reason why road trips like this one can be so much fun 🙂

This morning we visited Indian Echo Caverns, a cave very close to Hershey Park. I’ve been to a few caves in my time, but this one was one of the best.

The cave was known (and likely used by) Indians before it was ‘discovered’ about 200 years ago. In 1929 the cave became privately owned and opened to the public for tours, and has remained mostly unchanged since then.

It has two passages meeting at a right angle in an enormous room they call the ballroom, which is over 50 feet high and about 200 feet wide. You could easily build a rollercoaster in this room (which didn’t photograph well due to the darkness) and it was easily the biggest cave room I’ve ever been in.

Although the cave is now wired with electric lights and gravel paths have been added, it still has many striking formations and pools inside and while smaller than other caves I have visited was well worth the trip. It’s also one of almost ten caves in Pennsylvania that can be visited, which almost suggests it’s own road trip doesn’t it?

As an aside this cave has entered local folk history due to being the home of a hermit for almost twenty years back in the early 1800s. His story is fascinating: read about him here (and yes we visited the ‘room’ he lived in).

Oh and they have animals near the cave shop for people to admire while waiting for their guided tour. This turkey was about the biggest I have ever seen!

After the cave we drove to our next destination which took us right through Amish country. We passed many gift shops and places selling Amish handicrafts, and yes we saw some Amish buggies riding along as well. But we didn’t stop, since the coast beckoned. I’ll save the details of where we are now for tomorrow 🙂

Back to the park today, and we started with the water rides!

There are quite a lot of them, and we rode several water slides, a lazy river, and an insane log flume with a massive drop that created a gigantic plume of water when it reached the bottom.

Since we hit the water rides first the waits weren’t lengthy, and we were able to ride everything we wanted in about 3 hours. If you had kids with you this part of the park could easily fill an entire day, since there’s loads of kiddie friendly rides for them to play around in.

Probably due to the reduced heat and lack of rain, the park was much busier today, and by the time we had dried off and had some lunch some of the attractions had lines as long as two hours. We wandered around a bit squashing pennies for Bernard’s collection before it was time to tackle a few of the rides we hadn’t managed yesterday.

We both rode the Ferris wheel and a historically significant single-loop coaster (the first of its kind on the east coast!). Kristin was a bit anxious in line for each, but had fun on both 🙂

Even though the line was longish, I then decided to wait for the newest coaster in the park, Candymonium. It was about a half hour wait, and I chose to wait a few more minutes for a front seat. The ride was incredible: super smooth with astonishing amounts of air time. Despite being enormously high and fast (>120 km/hr) there was only a lap bar (albeit a robust one) and on every hill you felt yourself lifting up from your seat for a second or two. For a ride with no inversions it was surprisingly exhilarating and so much fun to ride I would have gone right back on if there wasn’t a line. For me, this was the best coaster in the park.

Afterwards we did one more quick ride on the bonkers log flume we rode yesterday before calling it a day (it was nearly 6 o’clock). Another 7 hour park day, and over the two days 9 of 14 roller coasters rode (this would have been higher but two were closed today). We deem our Hershey Park visit a big success!