Three Days in Cape May

Even after traveling over ten hours on Tuesday we could not resist walking into the downtown area of Cape May after settling into our slip at Utsch’s Marina. It is about a three mile round trip walk to the heart of Cape May where the main shopping, beach and most of the restaurants are located. To say that this town is charming, quaint and delightful is a most egregious understatement. We have seen a lot of small seaside towns thus far in our adventures but never anything like Cape May. Even with our dear friends Eleanor, Harold and Nancy raving about Cape May for years, we were not prepared for what we discovered. Immediately noticeable and blatantly refreshing is the fact that there are NO name brand businesses within Cape May proper. All hotels, restaurants, shops are locally owned and operated – most of them family owned for generations and never have we seen so many beautiful establishments in one location. It did not take me very long to spot the yarn store but since Captain Mark was hungry I offered to come back to the yarn store the next day so that he did not perish from malnutrition.

Cape May Canal



The Cape May Canal stretches nearly three miles from Cape May Harbor to the Delaware Bay. The waterway was constructed to provide a route to avoid German U-boats operating off Cape May Point. Dredged as a wartime emergency measure in 1942, the canal was the final link in a protected waterway intended to allow coastal shipping to travel along the coast with a greatly reduced risk of attack from German submarines.
Today the canal is part of the Intracoastal Waterway System (ICW). The current in the canal flows the opposite way that it would if the canal were a river emptying into the bay. When the tide is moving from low to high (flood tide), the canal current is flowing toward the Delaware Bay. Located at the junction of the Cape May Canal and Delaware Bay is the Cape May Ferry Terminal. Huge ferries scurry back and forth from the terminal to Lewes, Delaware providing a valuable and logistic means of transportation and reducing by hours the time it would take to drive around the Delaware Bay to points south.

Hoosiers in for a shock…


I know that I am naïve at times but I have to tell you that I was dumbfounded, appalled, stunned and downright flabbergasted by this seemingly charming looking gentleman. Captain Mark and I awoke early on our first full day in Cape May so that we could walk along the beach and explore the town more fully than we did the evening before. We walked to the area where we thought the public beach began and very innocently started to walk through the sand toward the water. WELL, you would have thought that we were attempting to rob a Brinks Truck by the decibel of shouts aimed in our direction and the large (I might add gorgeous) bodies of young men blocking our path. It seems that there is a fee to enter the city beaches in New Jersey and they are not kidding in the least.



Stunned beyond words, all we could do was walk back to the Promenade and try to get glimpses of the water. Now the stupidest part of this whole thing is that I really don’t like beaches, especially the sand and the salt water. It wasn’t that we did not have the $5 each for the daily fee…it was that there was a charge for the beach in the first place. Captain Mark, being the reformed juvenile delinquent that he is, spent the rest of the day thinking of all sorts of ways in which we could sneak onto the beach…and if we did and were caught, how would we ever be able to look our kids in the eye once they had to send money in order to bail us out of jail for “beach breaking and entering”?

Eleanor and Harold come to visit

I am not sure what I was thinking but I did not get a photo of all of us together in Cape May so I will just recycle our photo from Florida. We last saw our dear friends Eleanor and Harold when we visited them at their winter home in Florida in early 2008. Now that we are all within the state lines of New Jersey it was more than time for a visit. They come to Cape May often to relax with family so they knew all the best places to show us. After catching up aboard the Lolligag they took us for a tour of the hinter lands surrounding downtown Cape May.


They took us to the remains of the Atlantus, a concrete ship whose story is probably not our country’s finest naval accomplishment. Then we went in search of Cape May diamonds but opted to purchase them instead of trying to break into another Cape May beach where the “diamonds” are often located. As our very own personal tour guides, they took us to a New Jersey State Park where we could walk in the Jersey surf without paying a fee, climb a lighthouse if we desired, found a local winery for us where we sampled the local vino and finally found the perfect spot for dinner on the water. As frequent travelers themselves, Eleanor and Harold know exactly how to showcase their local area and the day was over all too soon.




The Lobster House

Located immediately adjacent to Utsch’s Marina is the world renowned Lobster House of Cape May. We tried to eat at this restaurant each day that we were in Cape May and never found a wait time of less than 1.5 hours. It seems that folks drive from all over the eastern shore to dine at this establishment. While at first disappointed, we quickly concluded that since we were not able to eat at the Lobster House on this visit it meant that we were destined to return to Cape May in the future.