Birthday On The Beach

We were awakened Friday morning by bright sunlight sneaking around the curtains. When we looked out, we could see a prefect blue sky over the ocean. Marilyn wanted to walk on the beach to start her birthday, so we went out to do that. There were only joggers, walkers and bike riders out for the most part. 

This one shows the Trump Plaza, where we're staying, and the Boardwalk Hall. More about that later.

Here's Marilyn either contemplating life or looking for sea shells!

And this is our beach shadow selfie!

We passed by a little tidal pool area where this really interesting sand pattern had formed.

They seem to be planting more of the dune grasses and protecting the grasses that are already there. The beach and boardwalk are also kept very clean.

Next on our list was a birthday breakfast. I had researched a bit about good breakfast places and a place called Gilchrist's got a lot of mentions. It's about a ten minute drive from the boardwalk in an area near a marina and has been in business since 1946. We loved it and both had an omelet like this. Best homefries I've eaten too!

After a drive along the coast and back, we rushed over to the Boardwalk Hall where there was a free organ concert and tour. The Hall was built in the late 1920s and started hosting the Miss America Pageant in 1932. We had no idea that this was the location. Unfortunately, Lady Gaga is coming to do a performance so they couldn't play the big organ because it would disturb the workers who were setting things up. But we learned that the organ has over 33 000 pipes and is the biggest one in the world. It is currently being restored after decades of not being used. The cost will be over $14 million and will take another 9 years. We did hear a performance on a smaller, but still very impressive, organ. Then we had a tour to see the inner workings of the big organ and the workshop where it is being fixed. Here, we're on the stage where the Miss America contestants did their stuff. I was imagining my speech about kittens, puppies and world peace!

This is in the organ fixing workshop. 

This is the control console for the main organ. It has an incredible number of keys and buttons. 

We decided that after a healthy breakfast and all of yesterday's eating that we'd walk instead of eating lunch. There is an International Sandcastle competition running this weekend so we went to check it out. There are competitors from all over the world and we saw the beginnings of some amazing pieces of sand art. 

In the background of this one you can see the Steel Pier which is basically a collection of carnival games and rides. We decided not to go on any of the rides as they all looked like they would cause varying degrees of motion sickness!

Here's another view of the Boardwalk with the Taj Mahal in the foreground. We'll be heading out past here to go to dinner tonight. 

 On to the birthday dinner! As Marilyn said halfway through our meal, "Good thing we didn't eat lunch!" This was about 2 courses after I wondered if I'd made a mistake in ordering the Chef's Tasting Menu at  Amada. We were in the Revel Hotel and the restaurant is owned by Jose Garces who is an Iron Chef. The restaurant was beautiful and overlooked the ocean. 

The tasting menu was four courses that seemed more like eight as the food just kept coming. The first items out were Jamon Iberico, olives, manchego cheese, apple and lavender honey.

Next up was a plate of grilled octopus and potatoes. Even if you have never had octopus before, you would love this. It's inspiried me to try some octopus on our grill at home.

 

I was a bit worried as the next dish appeared. It was obiously a bowl of peppers with a sauce. I imagined them to be firey hot and then I'd be eating all of them myself! Our server was back to explain the dish and said that only 1 in 10 of these peppers were actually hot. I tried the first one and it was very hot! The sauce was ground red peppers with almonds and seasoning. Marilyn ate the next one and it was mild as were all the rest. 

A flatbread with manchego cheese, shrimp and chorizo came next. It was delicious. 

The next dish was really two and consisted of patatas bravas (potatoes with spicy tomato sauce and paprika) and grilled scallops with pesto.

Our server told us that the main course was next! We were a bit worried at this point but we managed to eat most of it! We had a grilled rib eye with three sauces and a type of risotto with peas, asparagus wild mushrooms and truffle oil. 

And, we still had to deal with dessert which, fortunately, was pretty light. It was olive oil cake with figs and ginger ice cream. All in all, an excellent birthday dinner!

After dinner, we wandered around the hotel on the outside and found a deck that overlooked the ocean. It's a beautiful, relatively new, hotel but is apparently about to go bankrupt! Even though Hurricane Sandy didn't do a lot of physical damage to the boardwalk area, business has fallen off sharply in many places. 

We'll be in Philly tomorrow hoping for decent weather. The forecast says rain but maybe we'll be lucky!

The Chocolate Vortex

This post was supposed to be mostly about getting to Atlantic City and checking it out. However, we stopped at Hershey's Choclate World at 9:02 this morning and everything changed. Marilyn was strangely excited to be there. I figured it was going to be a chocolate store with a little tour to show the process. But no! As soon as we walked in, we were sucked in by the Chocolate Vortex! I haven't been to Disney Land so don't really have a point of reference, but this place was crazy. It had every kind of chocolate thing that you could imagine and some that you couldn't. There were happy, smiley people everywhere wanting to help you! And there was a Reese's Pieces Man walking around! Yikes!

Hershey makes many so many more things than chocolate kisses.

Marilyn couldn't believe that Hershey made her favourite candy, Twizzlers! And, they even came in rainbow colours.

At this point, I walked away and browsed for a few minutes, 5 at the most. When I came back, one of the chocolate smiley guys was helping Marilyn put all her purchases into a basket! I admit that I added the chocolate coated almonds, but that was it!

To top it all off, we did go on the tour but it was Disney-esque due to the singing animatronic cows. And, we had to ride in a silly chocolate train. Luckily, it wasn't crowded yet and we had a whole car to ourselves! If you have kids and are in the Hershey PA area, it would be a great place to stop even though I was just there for the chocolate. 

After that interlude, we drove through Hershey, marvelling at how beautiful the town was. Milton Hershey apparently donated a great deal of money to the town and I wish that we'd been able to take more time to look around. As it was, we needed to get on the road to Cape May NJ. It turned out to be a quaint resort town on the sea that reminded us of Key West and Provincetown. There were lots of shops and restaurants and old, restored homes. There was also a nice looking beach but, for some reason, they were charging just to walk on it! I refuse to pay to walk on a beach so we walked on the boardwalk beside the beach and looked from there. 

The highlight of Cape May was our lunch. We stopped at a place on the pedestrian mall called The Fish Market. I had a crab roll that was incredible. It had, by Toronto standards, about $30 worth of large lump crabmeat and next to no filler. 

Marilyn had a lobster quesadilla that was full of large chunks of lobster. I know because I had to help her finish it off! 

On the way out of Cape May, we saw many of these large vacation homes. We weren't sure if they were family places or rentals but they would be a great place to stay in any case!

As an afterthought, we went to our hotel in Atlantic City! It's right on the boardwalk and we set out immediately to see what was around. Of course, it started to rain, but it was warm rain so we continued walking and saw many of the sights. If you've been to Vegas, Atlantic City pales by comparison, but it has the ocean and the boardwalk which count for something! Due to our largish lunch, we didn't feel like too much for dinner. So we ended up at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville for what was supposed to be a snacky type dinner. We started off with a beer (Marilyn) and the It's 5:00 Somewhere Margarita for me. Not my usual, but I needed to try it as it had 2 types of rum, tequila, and some orange and pineapple juices. Our dinner snack, the Volcano Nachos, were not in the snack category and we did not finish this mountain of food! Luckily, we had a 2 km walk back to our hotel and for the day, we did 18 km! 

This is the boardwalk on the way back. The lights in the sky are not stars. We actually thought it was part of a light show but it was hundreds and hundreds of seagulls flying around in the bright lights!

On The Road To Atlantic City

It seems like I was just writing about Vienna the other day but it's been a month since we got home from Europe. I guess we have the travel bug for sure because we decided while we were on the cruise that we wanted to travel for Marilyn's birthday. Originally, it was going to be Cleveland but that turned into Tennessee after we met some new friends who live in Knoxville. Then we figured the Tennessee/Kentucky trip needed to be longer so that we could fully appreciate all the bbq, bourbon and quilts that are apparently in that part of the USA. As a result, it was moved to September and will be our first day of school trip. We decided to go to Atlantic City for Marilyn's birthday and then hit Philadelphia on the way home for a couple of days. 

Our first stop this afternoon was Corning, NY. Many years ago, Marilyn's family went there, and also to Hershey (the chocolate place), on a summer trip. So, we're kind of recreating that trip minus the sleeping in a camper part! I thought the Corning place would be a Corningware store, but no! It was a really interesing glass museum.  

The first thing that we did was to watch a glass blowing demo where the artist made a vase out of a blob of glass. I've seen the process before but it's always fascinating.

Then we watched as another artist who used a different kind of glass to make a little fish. This was even more amazing as we were talked through each step with detailed explanations. This glass needs 3000 degrees F to melt. I imagined how many trips to the emergency room would be required if I worked with this stuff!

We also looked at the galleries with both ancient and modern glass pieces. We both learned quite a bit about how ancient civilizations made beautiful glass ornaments without the aid of modern technology.

This modern piece is made with highly reflective glass and was mesmerizing to look at.

After Corning, it was about 3 hours to Harrisburg, where we had planned to spend the night. We drove through some treed, hilly stretches and then followed the Susquehanna River into the city. That was after our stop at Costco where we found, to our dismay, that Pennsylvania Costcos do not carry wine. Luckily, there are other wine and spirits stores that have pretty great prices for things that we like!

We got settled at our hotel and headed off into Harrisburg to find what was described as the "trendy dining street". The first place the gps sent us to was in a not so nice part of town where there were no restaurants and lots of broken down industrial buildings. We drove back towards the river and found the trendy part which was not trendy at all. There were some restaurants but the streets were mostly empty and I was reminded of The Walking Dead once again! We passed this cool looking diner but it was closed. Might go there for breakfast.

In the end, we discovered that all the good restaurants were within a couple of kilometres of our hotel in what are basically the suburbs of Harrisburg. And this is the capital city of Pennsylvania! We think we might hit Scranton on the way home and see how that compares. 

Our restaurant choice was Joe K's Brew House and it worked out well. They had a good range of craft beers and something called steam pots. They were sort of like crab boils or clam bakes I'd say. We got one that pretty much had everything in it including a whole lobster, a bunch of snow crab, clams, shrimp, potatoes and corn on the cob. 

After we'd finished off the lobster and most of the shrimp and clams, there was still quite a bit left.

As you can imagine, the table looked like a war zone, at least on my side. And somehow, despite having about 6 napkins on my lap, I managed to get stuff on my pants. At least I got to try out the Tide spot remover stick when we got back!

Tomorrow, we'll start off with a visit to the Hershey Chocolate World. I expect that there will be some chocolate eating. Then, we plan to check out Cape May before heading into Atlantic City. It's a seaside resort town that a number of people have recommended.