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06/28/2004 Archived Entry: "Weekend Trips: Ocean City, Yankees, and Cape May"

Friday I did a company tour to Ocean City, New Jersey -- about as easy as a trip can be -- just drop the passengers by the boardwalk and wait for them to come back. I had a nice time talking to another driver parked next to me, walking the boardwalk and having dinner at one of the boardwalk restaurants.

Saturday was pretty much the opposite ... I drove for a private charter to a Yankees game (Mets beat the Yankees 9-3) at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, New York City. That's a trip I'll be just as happy not to have to repeat anytime soon. Traffic across the George Washington Bridge was bumper to bumper both going and coming. Fortunately we had left early enough that I still got the group to the stadium an hour before the game. But then came the job of finding parking. Traffic around the stadium area was hardly moving, including lots of other motorcoaches that had arrived even earlier than me, so I decided to head for the one parking lot for motorcoaches near the stadium (River and 165th, $40 per coach). I was lined up to go into the parking lot, but the coach directly in front of me was the last one allowed in before they closed it to motorcoaches. The lot was full -- so close and yet so far. So I drove around for over 90 minutes looking unsuccessfully for on-street parking. Everything was packed; I never saw so many coaches at a ball game. And the police were no help whatsoever; although there were lots of them, apparently they were all imported from other precincts and had no idea where to send coaches for parking. Finally, about half an hour after the start of the game, the police virtually disappeared and we were able to park on River near 164th Street, an area they had chased several of us from when we had tried that earlier. They left us alone the rest of the day. Of course, by that time, we only had a couple of hours to relax until we had to fight the traffic to get out of Brooklyn again. But it took me almost half an hour less to get back than it had to get in originally, so it could have been even worse.

Sunday was another company tour, this time to the shore at Cape May, New Jersey. First stop was the Cape May County Zoo, operated by the Cape May County Park Commission, where we spent a couple of hours viewing the nearly 250 species of animals on display there (photo of giraffes at left), and had lunch at the zoo's outdoor cafe (great cheeseburger and fries!). After the zoo we drove to just outside Cape May where the group boarded the Cape May Whale Watcher (photo at right). It was a three hour cruise several miles out into the ocean looking for whales and dolphins. Whales had been spotted earlier in the day, but this time they weren't able to find them. Dolphins, however, abounded, and the passengers really enjoyed watching them cavorting around the ship. Traffic on the Garden State Parkway and the Atlantic City Expressway was very heavy, as expected, at the end of a weekend of great weather at the shore.