The Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey (21-24 July 2025)

Flies and aborted hikes and blown boat engine….and Superman!

We made our way to southern New Jersey in the region of the Pine Barrens, a place I’d always wanted to see ever since reading an article in OUTSIDE Magazine in the mid-1970s! Our campground was very close to the marshy grassy area where birdwatchers gathered to see the birds. We had dinner at a fun local place, the Oyster Creek Restaurant and I saw at least two diners with field glasses in hand!

The grasslands in the marshes were such a different landscape for me and I could not get enough of them. There’s an 8-mile one way loop through the “swamp” that we drove twice. It was enchanting at dusk. I got out to take the Night Heron and sunset shots and was bombarded by big flies—each one about 0.75” long, with tapering abdomens. The martins could not keep up and when I got back in the truck, there were a couple DOZEN of them that had flown into the half-open windows (even in the early evening, the temps were in the mid-90s still!). I did my best to whoosh them out of the car using a towel I had. If they landed on you and bit you, you KNEW it! It hurt! They terrorized us for the remainder of our trip and were responsible for a hike cut short our second day there. Them and the mid-90s heat/humidity. (Doing a little googling, I think what we hated so much here were “green head flies”—the shape and size are a match for what we saw. Vicious. You would hate them too.) We have never cut short a hike before…until those flies. 

They won.

Dan had the idea to take a boat out to try to beat the heat so he signed us up for a dolphin-watching trip. When they started up the engine, there was a burst of blue smoke and the smell of gas. They couldn’t fix it on the spot, and so, for the first time in 24 years of doing these tours, they had to cancel their dolphin-watching tour! We were beginning to feel like we were a jinx!

So, we opted for Plan B, going to see the new SUPERMAN movie. They were 15 minutes late in starting the movie when the manager came in and announced that they had a problem with one of the projectors and it would be about another 15 minutes, but they WOULD be presenting the movie! And the movie was the perfect quintessential summer action hero movie—and the theater was cool! Best part, other than the cute actors playing Clark Kent and Lois Lane? Lots and LOTS of it was filmed in CLEVELAND and we recognized all the places. It was a fun film and Cleveland looked SO GOOD.

So, had you been waiting for this post? For more than a week, I’ve not had an internet signal strong enough to load Wordle (eventually it would load!), and getting a blog post published was impossible. There’s more to come but I may not get to it until we get home at this rate. 

(We made it to College Park, MD, our 47th state with the RoadHouse, 

but the signal here is “just barely” enough to push this through to publication!) Enjoy NJ!

View looking west from the back patio of the Oyster Creek Restaurant

Oyster shells outside the Oyster Creek Restaurant

Egrets

 

Night Heron

Birdwatching tower nearing dusk

Myrica

Juniper…gin anyone?

Night Heron in his closeup

I don’t care how many martins there were, they were slacking on 

eliminating those voracious carnivorous flies!

Swamp mallow was in bloom all over in the wetlands

While it’s pretty pixelated, it was taken with the zoom on my phone, so not too bad!

Osprey nesting site.

This was the view from the BAT Mobile of the osprey nest platform. 

And way off in the distance is Atlantic City!

Dan wanted to touch the Atlantic; he’d done to same with the Pacific in Oregon.

Oceans Resort Exterior. This was, at least for me, the most visually interesting building on the Boardwalk. We walked very nearly from end to end of the Boardwalk, then back to where we started. 4.96 miles.

Safari Shadow Dan

One of the interior lobbies of Oceans Resort

The Boardwalk in Atlantic City

This “Art” Gallery was apparently going out of business and was having its final clearance sales. Most storefronts were open for business and lots of them had the same tee shirts, hats, bathing suits and tchotchkes that catered to tourists. We bought some salt water taffy, another “invention” from Atlantic City, to take home with us for our dog sitters!

View from our lunch table.

Racing carts at the end of the steel pier

Slow early after just opening 

Just awaiting some tourists

Tile flooring decoration in the entrance to the Arcade on the Steel Pier

Fannie Lou Hamer is forever linked to Atlantic City because she gave a speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention there, representing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which she was a founder. Hamer gave a powerful speech to the convention's credentials committee, describing the beatings and harassment she faced while attempting to register to vote in Mississippi. Her recounting of personal experiences and the challenges faced by Black people in the Jim Crow South exposed systemic inequalities within the Democratic Party and the nation. Hamer's closing remark, "Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?" resonated with many.

Mr Peanut was “born” in Atlantic City.

We were surprised at seeing yet ANOTHER Merry-Go-Round 

at a local shopping area not far from our campsite.