Saturday night, before we left Tony and Lilla, we discussed the next day's travels and decided that it would be cool to take a leisurely drive down the New Jersey coast. Neither Susan nor I had been on a ferry since we were kids, so we thought crossing from New Jersey to Delaware on the Cape May ferry would be an adventure. First bad decision.
Tony told me that I should make a reservation on the ferry because it gets pretty busy in the summer. I looked at the ferry web-site and saw that they were indeed sold out for a lot of Saturday, but the next day showed all green across the board. We also didn't have an exact schedule for leaving the next morning, so I thought it would be difficult to predict when we would get to the ferry. Anyway, I didn't make a reservation and took the chance. Second bad decision.
Around 11:15am we finally hit the road and quickly found out that you don't see anything except trees driving down the Garden State Parkway from Sea Bright to Cape May. We arrived at the ferry terminal at 2:00pm and discovered that the ferry was sold out until 6:00pm. We decided that we really didn't want to hang around Cape May for 4 hours, so we turned back north to Wilmington Delaware to get on to Interstate 95. Third bad decision.
The drive north and west across southern New Jersey was actually not bad. The roads were good, the traffic light and we passed through some pretty little towns like Dennis and Vineland (Lilla's hometown). We saw some road side markets and a wine festival in progress.
We entered the New Jersey Turnpike going south on the second to last entrance, about 10 miles north of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. It was still a pleasant drive until we got to the toll booths at the end of the New Jersey Turnpike. The traffic backup was unbelievable. It took us about 45 minutes to get off the Turnpike. Then we hit the same situation twice more to pay the toll for the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the toll to the great state of Delaware for the privilege of crossing less than 10 miles of their sovereign territory on I95. Holy moly! It's $3.00 to cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge and $7.00 to cross less than 10 miles of Delaware. All East Coast people who have to drive these roads should be PISSED to have to wait in line for 45 minutes to pay that much money to drive about 25 miles per hour for 10 miles. What a giant ripoff! I know that Tony is laughing at me right now.
Anyway, it took 11 hours on the road to get from Sea Bright to Richmond, Virginia. We thought about pushing on to North Carolina as it was only another 3 hours, but we were just too tired. We stopped in Richmond for the night.
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