{"id":1533,"date":"2008-09-01T18:49:36","date_gmt":"2008-09-01T23:49:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=1533"},"modified":"2008-09-01T19:01:12","modified_gmt":"2008-09-02T00:01:12","slug":"ocean-city-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1533","title":{"rendered":"Ocean City Photos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I just now put up a new gallery of shots I took at Ocean City, New Jersey yesterday.&nbsp; Labor Day weekend kind of snuck up on me this year, and I hadn&#8217;t made any plans at all.&nbsp; I had a lot of housework I could do, but I could just let the weekend slid by without doing <em>Something<\/em>. So I thought of going to Ocean City.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>Ocean City is where I went with mom on her summer vacations, back when I was a young teen.&nbsp; I&#8217;d been taken to a variety of east coast beach towns when I was small, but in my early adolescence we settled on Ocean City, and went back year after year.&nbsp; And OC is where most of my best memories of vacationing by the seashore are.&nbsp; You can see some of the shots I took way back in the 1970s in <em>Gallery Three &#8211; The Shadows and Light Sessions<\/em>.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It was probably too late to reserve a room at the beach&#8230;and anyway I am saving for a couple trips I want to take later this year&#8230;One to Key West on New Year&#8217;s Eve, and the other to Disneyworld&#8230;maybe&#8230;during the week the Hubble servicing mission launches.&nbsp; Disneyworld could end up costing a lot, and for sure Key West will as the rates just go through the roof there that week (as I found out last year!).&nbsp; So I have to save for all that.&nbsp; But Ocean City New Jersey is only about a three and a half hour drive from Casa del Garrett.&nbsp; So yesterday morning I basically just jumped in the car with only my Canon digital SLR and a zoom lens and drove to Ocean City for a day trip.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a short drive&#8230;first up I-95 to the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and then basically follow US Route 40 almost to the coast.&nbsp; At Harding Lakes you take road 559 to Great Egg Harbor Bay and across to Ocean City.&nbsp; It&#8217;s one of those Jersey Shore barrier island beach towns.&nbsp; From the north end of the island you can see the Atlantic City Casinos, which I&#8217;ve never had the slightest urge to visit.&nbsp; Ocean City has a nice beach, a great boardwalk and a friendly atmosphere&#8230;in part I&#8217;m convinced because it is one of the few &quot;dry&quot; beach towns on the east coast.&nbsp; Meaning they don&#8217;t serve alcohol there and you can&#8217;t buy it in any store.&nbsp; I think that probably keeps the rowdiness factor down.&nbsp; If you really want it, you can buy it at the huge liquor store right across the bridge on the mainland and bring it back, and drink to your heart&#8217;s content in your room.&nbsp; Just don&#8217;t take it outside or go wandering around drunk because you <em>Will<\/em> get noticed by the police.<\/p>\n<p>When I got there I drove to my OC point of reference&#8230;the Port O Call hotel, which is a really nice 60s design six floor hotel right on the boardwalk&#8230;the only high rise they ever allowed to be built there.&nbsp; This time I wasn&#8217;t getting a room&#8230;my plan was to just find a parking space and stroll the boardwalk with my camera for the afternoon, and maybe take in a good boardwalk restaurant.&nbsp; At first it looked like I might not be able to find any street parking at all.&nbsp; Most of the streets near the beach are lined with individual guest houses, many of which have little to no parking of their own.&nbsp; So everyone parks on the street.&nbsp; When the guest houses are full, so are the streets.&nbsp; I drove up and down for a while, and then went to where the all day lots are, and as it turned out, there were spaces available there after all.&nbsp; It was twenty bucks for all day parking&#8230;but that was a lot less then the cost of a room and the boardwalk would provide all I needed for the day in terms of food and drink and clean restrooms.\n<\/p>\n<p>Now I know I can have a good time at OC for an afternoon on the spur of the moment with just my camera and a few bucks.&nbsp; The only drawback was that I didn&#8217;t want to go home and kept putting it off until late.&nbsp; So consequently I didn&#8217;t get back until very late.&nbsp; But for just the cost of gasoline and parking and beach food it was worth it.<\/p>\n<p>I may go back on my birthday week.&nbsp; I asked around and it turns out nowadays the boardwalk doesn&#8217;t start closing down until October.&nbsp; The big Wonderland amusment park at the north end of the boardwalk doesn&#8217;t close for the season until October 15th.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp; &nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"550\" width=\"366\" alt=\" \" src=\"http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/bruce_garrett\/Ocean%20City,%20NJ%20-%20Labor%20Day%20Weekend%202008\/pictures\/picture-26.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">More in the Ocean City photo gallery&#8230;<a href=\"http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/bruce_garrett\/Ocean%20City,%20NJ%20-%20Labor%20Day%20Weekend%202008\/index.html\">Here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I just now put up a new gallery of shots I took at Ocean City, New Jersey yesterday.&nbsp; Labor Day weekend kind of snuck up on me this year, and I hadn&#8217;t made any plans at all.&nbsp; I had a lot of housework I could do, but I could just let the weekend slid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,94,1],"tags":[191],"class_list":["post-1533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-travel","category-uncategorized","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}