Down the Shore

Sam’s first trip to the Jersey shore (that’s New Jersey, USA).

We started with a visit to the Cape May Courthouse Zoo. This is a free zoo. It was nice, although we worried that several of the animals didn’t have enough room (at least as not as much as the animals at Oakland and San Diego have). Sam said that the zebras were her favorite, but she also spent time watching the American Black Bear pace around his cage.

The most thrilling part for me was hearing the male lion roar. For a split second I thought it was an earthquake. The crowd ceased milling as the sound vibrated through us. A man standing near me said, “I felt that in my stomach!” He was not wrong. We must surely be hardwired to flee those rumbling sounds, though there was more of a shriek to it than I expected. Sam had the very sensible response to want to get as far away from the lion as possible. But I held her and moved closer so we could see him. He was stretching his paws up a tree and watching something out of view. We never learned what escaped the king of the jungle’s jaws.

After lions and leopards and cheetahs and bears and wallabies and the cutest little tamarin monkeys I’ve ever seen, we escaped to the beach. When I was a girl we came to Cape May for a week every summer. Back then, Cape May was a sleepy, quaint, undiscovered little Victorian seaside town. But sometime in the last 20 years they expanded the beach and the town became found. They kept the quaint though.

We spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach. Sam was cautious at first about the water but then she learned to love walking into the waves and getting splashed. Her favorite activity was filling a pail with water and then watching her grandfather pour it through a plastic water mill:

There was also sand-castle building. This one has a bit of a volcanic look to it.

After a nice dinner at the Merion Watson Inn (another place I fondly remember from my girlhood) and a brief walk to look at some of the old Victorian ladies (that’s houses), we drove back to PA. Sam fell into bed at about 10:30PM and stayed there until I woke her up at 10AM the next morning!

I need to remember that one secret to a good night’s sleep is a day at the beach.