The Shore - The Cape May Zoo

I only took a few hundred pics this past week while on my mini-vacation, so I figured it would be best to split this up into a few posts...

Anything you see in "quotations" is a Yankee/Jersey word/phrase that this southern boy normally wouldn't use.

Tricia and Gwyneth arrived in Jersey on Thursday, and drove with most of her family to "the shore", Ocean City on Friday...all of her brothers and sisters, with families in tow, spent, at least, part of the weekend hanging out and having fun. Tricia's parents rented a beach house in northern OC, a few blocks from the ocean, literally at the very north end of the boardwalk. I arrived late Sunday night.



I was told that the weekend was nice and warm, but from Monday morning through Wednesday when we left to come home, the temps were in the 70's, the sky was overcast and there was a strong wind blowing off the water...which, of course, makes for some unfavorable beach conditions. I only spent about an hour total in the sand on the beach, most of that time fully clothed because it was so chilly. But, that's fine with me because I can go to the beach anytime I want anyway. Here's the one picture of me and Gwyneth on the beach, enjoying some fishes (they're so delicious!)...Tricia stayed wrapped in a sweatshirt and towel.


But, when we weren't directly on the sand by the ocean, the weather was perfect for everything else we did! Tricia grew up vacationing at Ocean City and other places along the shore in southern NJ, so she had 101 things for us to do. Monday afternoon, the three of us headed down the coast about 20 miles to the Cape May County Zoo!

This was probably the best zoo I've ever been to, which is saying something since I've been to some pretty sweet zoos. Here's a few reasons why (all you other zoos pay attention):

1) It's free...yes, free (although we did give a donation), which, based on my experience of the NJ shore, is pretty remarkable (considering you've got to pay just to physically be on the sand/beach...).
2) It was probably about 90% shaded...nearly everywhere you walk, you're under the shade of lots of trees (in comparison, our local Norfolk Zoo is basically a giant concrete oven).
3) It's not too big and not too small...it took us about 2 hours to walk through the entire thing and look at every animal.












A couple of other highlights from the zoo include a newborn lemur, a local snake just hanging out near the alligator exhibit, and a very loud and lightning fast cheetah fight.

Nate