Day 11: New Jersey

Our last day of camping was a stay in New Jersey. To get there, one of the proposed options from Google Maps was to cut across New York City in the Bronx. We thought if we did this we’d be able to look South and the girls would be able to see a bit of the city skyline. While that did turn out to be true, it was rather naive to think we’d have a great view. The path through the Bronx is mostly surface level so you don’t get much of a view until you cross the George Washington Bridge. So while the route was only slightly longer than other options, we spent most of our time in NYC crawling through traffic.

Eventually we made it into New Jersey. We stopped at Target to get some more water and then lunch and then finished the drive to the campground, the Delaware River Campground. This was maybe my least favorite campground we stayed at. It wasn’t necessarily bad but it wasn’t great. I’m not a huge stickler for rules and regulations while camping, but this place had countless code violations. It really made me think how remarkable it is that more people aren’t hurt at campgrounds from things like decks caving in or electrocution. The campground also felt rundown and a bit odd. For example they had a putt-putt course with 8 holes…..not 9. They had a pool that looked decent but it had about a hundred people in it. The did however have a decent playground and that was really all we needed.

We didn't get to the campground until around 3pm. At first I figured we'd let the girls go in the pool but like I mentioned it was jam packed. We instead did some putt-putt, played some games that had, and then spent some time on the playground. The campground is right on the Delaware river, so we were able to walk over to it and say that we were in New Jersey, and then point across the river and say "that is Pennsylvania". Kids always love that which is fun for me to see.

After dinner we were hanging out at the motorhome trying to decide how to end the evening. The older girls wanted to go back to the main area of the campground to play bingo and watch a movie. Allyson and I weren't too high on this idea. Not because of the campground, we were just worn out and splitting up adults was going to make putting Nolan to bed a challenge. I was able to bribe the girls to stay in the motorhome by streaming K-pop Demon Hunters on Netflix and offering popsicles. The girls are all very into this movie right now so they immediately opted to watch it. This was a unique "treat" on the trip. When we started the trip I learned that Netflix no longer supports downloading movies to a laptop. Most of the campgrounds have Wi-Fi, but it's always poor quality. You can download something with it, but we weren't able to do that with Netflix on the laptop. Fortunately we had OK cell phone service so I was able to do a wi-fi hotpot with my phone, which worked well enough to stream the movie.

The girls watched the movie and then made it to sleep at a decent time which was good because we were planning to leave extra early the next day to complete that last 6 hours of driving and make it home.