Jersey Shore

Today Kenji and I took our frist trip down to the Jersey shore. We didn't know where we should go exactly, so we decided to go visit a haunted museum called Spy House Museum, in Port Monmouth. But since we couldn't find too much info on it on the web, we weren't really sure whether it was still in operation. But we just needed a destination, so it didn't matter to us whether it was open or not.

As we approached it from town, Kenji got a creepy feeling that he'd seen the house in a dream he has just a couple nights ago!

So it turned out that the museum is undergoing restoration, which you can read about if you click on the sign I took a picture of below. As you can see, the building had been renamed from Spy House Museum to Seabrook Wilson House. Restoration won't begin till later this year.

Maybe we weren't able to get inside the building, but we at least got to peek in the windows!



Some pretty purple flowers in the front of the house... Needs a paint job, but I think it looks kind of nice and rustic with chipped paint.


Near the Seabrook Wilson House is a pier, and on such a nice day, lots of folks were out fishing.


After leaving the Seabrook Wilson House, we just wandered down the coast a little bit towards a little strip of land called Sandy Hook. We found a scenic overlook, so there's Sandy Hook right there in the distance.


The overlook also offers a view of New York City. But the visibility was not so good today, so no photo of a distant NYC skyline here. However, because of the ability to see NYC from this overlook on other days, the folks in Monmouth County erected a 911 memorial. As part of the memorial, there is a walkway which is a timeline of the events of that fateful morning, and the timeline begins with the plaque below.


Here are some folks walking along the timeline - each of the black lines in between the stones represents a different significant moment of that morning, such as when the planes hit, when the buildings fell, etc.

At the end of the walkway is statue of a bald eagle, and in its claws is, what I assume is, a twisted piece of the World Trade Center wreckage.


After leaving the overlook, we continued on our way to Sandy Hook. The weather suddenly took a turn for the worse - the wind picked up and the rain came down. Sand was blowing across the road, and people were scurrying to their cars.


We wanted to get a picture of the Twin Lighthouse that looms above Sandy Hook, but unfortunately this was the best we could do with the weather that was going on outside: