Visiting the Jersey Shore

In Florida and NC, you go to the beach. Some places call it the coast. In the mid-Atlantic states, you go to "the shore."
Friday was our day off. We had not been off together for 10 days, so we had a big day planned. After Mass we drove to Brigantine Wildlife Refuge near Atlantic City, and looked for the white-rumped sandpipers. They hadn't been seen for 5 days, but we wanted to give it a try. The tide was really high, and I guess there were no places for the little birds to feed on a mudflat, so we failed seeing them. We did see some beautiful mute swans (wild) and a great closeup of a merlin, a type of hawk.
From there we drove north to Tom's River, then took a bridge across Barnegat Bay to a barrier island. The houses on the island were so close that you could touch two different ones at the same time. However, most of the island had been preserved as Island Beach State Park, which was about 10 miles long and a few hundred feet wide.This is the only preserved barrier island in the entire state. We were looking for a thrush that had been found and banded the day before, but we had no real leads on the location, so we didn't see it. We did enjoy walking through the maritime forest on the bay side of the island and seeing the large dunes on the ocean side. The place was pretty much deserted as the season ends on Labor Day. We decided to find a place in the town of Seaside Park for dinner, and found a seafood restaurant still open until Sunday, when it would close until next May. The restaurant was on the second floor of a building and had windows on three sides overlooking the state park and the bay. It took us about an hour and 45 minutes to get back to Philadelphia. On the way back we drove through Lakehurst, NJ, site of the Hindenberg balloon explosion, and also Medford, NJ, where Mark's grandmother is buried.