"b1bob's New Jersey adventures: a work in... " a New Jersey Travel Page by b1bob

I will be the first to admit that this page on New Jersey adventures is incomplete. I have covered the New York and Philadelphia suburbs reasonably well, but I still need to cover the Jersey Shore and the rural northwest. If you find my page wanting, stick around. I'm not done here. I aim to be back and give fair coverage to as much as I can.

You have often heard of a bedroom community, a town within fairly close proximity of a large city where folks commute into the city to work and return home to the suburbs. It would not be entirely unfair to argue that New Jersey is a bedroom state. It has been dominated by the large cities of Philadelphia and New York, just outside the state's borders since colonial times. It gets its television news from the New York and Philadelphia media markets (I would hate to have to run a statewide campaign there) and the only major newspaper within its borders is The Newark Ledger. To be fair, there is more to New Jersey than exits on the New Jersey Turnpike, '40s diners, '70s malls, and bedroom communities. New Jersey is a very diverse state in a lot of ways. On geography it has both beaches and mountains; demographically from old Quaker stock to new Hispanics; economically from inner city slums to hunt country mansions. Although folks from New York tend to look down on New Jersey, the state more closely resembles the rest of the United States than does Manhattan.

Many folks couldn't rightly put b1bob and New Jersey in the same sentence, but two on three times I've been there, I went to visit friends. This page will always be a work in progress, so y'all come back:

30 December 1999- 2 January 2000: If you bet me ten years earlier that I would be in New Jersey at the turn of the century, I would have cheerfully taken the bet as soon as I stopped laughing uproariously (that might not have been until round about 1994). However, that is exactly where I was. Since J.D. and I have been friends since 1988, if you told me I would be spending the turn of the new millennium with him, I wouldn't have been surprised. Back then, I would have guessed it would have either been in San Juan, Puerto Rico or somewhere in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., but I never would have guessed it would be in a place like New Jersey. It was a quiet few days- just the way I wanted it. I was relieved J.D. and Deb didn't want to venture into New York City to take in the millennium. At the time 1999 became 2000, J.D., Deb and I were in the midst of a hard game of Scrabble.

14-16 December 2003: I was in Mount Laurel, New Jersey on business. My colleagues and I helped to liquidate a closed grocery store in town. My boss and I had come up for the day in mid-November to inventory the contents of the store, a 5-hour trip each way from the Richmond area. For the liquidation, we spent two nights at a hotel near where we were liquidating the store.

27-31 December 2003: Less than two weeks after returning from Mount Laurel on business, I was off to New Jersey again, but this time for fun. J.D. acquired some tickets to the New York Giants game against the Carolina Panthers, who went on later to win the NFC Championship and a slot in the Super Bowl. I was asked on Saturday, 27 December 2003 if I wanted to go, I said yes, and 4 hours later, I was on my way up to New Jersey. Besides the game, I saw J.D., Deb, and Savannah again, and baby Christina for the first time. We took rodizio at a Portuguese restaurant in the Ironbound section of Newark together with friends of J.D. and Deb. Even without the game, if J.D. had invited me just to hang about, I would have headed for the train just as fast.