Cape May-Monday

Today, we got to sleep in a little bit! Had a leisurely morning, coffee and breakfast out on the deck. Around noon, we headed out for our day's adventure -- a dolphin-watching cruise. I had found a Groupon for this at home a few months ago, so we decided to take advantage of it. We made it to the boat in plenty of time, and waited on the deck. Finally, it was time to board the boat. We got a seat up top where the viewing would be good. It was a pretty misty day, but we were hoping to see something exciting. And we did! Heading out, we saw some blue herons and their nests. And it wasn't long before we started seeing dolphin pods. Did you know dolphins weigh about 1000 lbs? They must be pure muscle! And a dolphin in the wild lives about 50-60 years, whereas a dolphin in captivity lives only about 5-7 years. I found that interesting. Finally, the dolphins starting appearing. At one point, they were surrounding us on all sides. The guide was calling out, "At 3:00, OK, now look at 8:00!", trying to give us direction on where they were! Then, he told us that if you make a lot of noise, they will sometimes come up and come closer to the boat. And it worked! We started yelling and clapping and banging on the side of the boat and they started coming closer and breeching! It was great. It was so incredibly hard to get pictures of them, though, because they'd only come up for a split second. Here's the best pic I managed to get:

 So that was our adventure for the day! We came home and had a casual dinner of burgers, fried potatoes and vegetables and hung out for the rest of the night. Watched Dancing With the Stars and headed to bed!

Cape May-Sunday

Today, we were up early (for a vacation) around 7:30. We wanted to get to Cape May Point State Park to do some bird-watching and monarch watching. It was pretty neat. There were birds that looked like swans swimming around the lake. I think they were actualy egrets of some sort, but I am blanking on their real name right now. But they were beautiful. We took a lot of pictures. Later in the morning, there was a demonstration of a hawk banding. That was great. It was a Cooper's Hawk. They band thousands of birds a season.  This was an interesting way to spend the morning.

We headed back to town and decided to do breakfast at the Pancake House. After that, we went back to the suite, then headed to the beach for awhile. We actually saw a few dolphins swimming out past the breaks. It was pretty cool!

We spent the rest of the day just relaxing. Dinner was nice. We decided to cook and have dinner on the rooftop deck. We made spaghetti with sausage and garlic bread, set up a beautiful table outside and watched the sun set while eating. We put some music on, laughed and talked and had a really nice dinner.

This is a really chill vacation -- we're not running around doing a lot of things, but we're enjoying ourselves. So another mellow day.

Question

Does anyone know how to change the name of your blog? I have determined this is more of a recap of travels than a recap of my life, so I wanted that to accurately reflect in the title of the blog. So, does anyone know how to do this?

Cape May-Friday and Saturday

So, vacation is finally here! And it is wonderful so far! Getting out the door Friday proved a little tougher than I would have thought. I guess I travel so much that it is a natural, no-big-deal thing to me to throw some things in a bag and go. But it's a little more involved for others, I guess. So, Cyn had to work for a few hours in the morning, which was fine, because our check-in time wasn't until 3:00 PM. But once she got home, it took forever to pack the car and get out the door. Not that I'm a light packer, but I didn't have 5 bags!! LOL! She got home about noon, but we didn't get on the road for a couple hours after that. We stopped at her coworker's house to drop off a gift of wine from Cyn, then got on the road. We ran into some terrible rainstorms on the way here. We finally made it around 6:00 PM.

Our suite/apartment is on the 3rd floor of an old Victorian mansion. Which means, we had to lug all the aforementioned luggage up three long, steep flights of stairs.  But once we got everything in, and got to look around, it is beautiful! Two beautiful bedrooms with antique furniture in each and a pull-out sleeper sofa in the living room. Two full bathrooms. A nice living room and kitchen. And a fantastic rooftop deck, where we can look out over all of Cape May. It is beautiful! So, we unpacked and decided to hit the grocery store for essentials. Got back around 9:00 PM, made hot dogs for dinner, watched a little TV and crashed! Cyn picked the turret bedroom, and it is beautiful in there. The only non-antique-y thing in there is the digital flat-screen. I tried to stay up and talk for awhile, but before I knew it, I was asleep! Can't blame me, by this time, it was going on 2:00 AM. I had set the alarm on the iTouch for 7:30, as we wanted to get up in the morning to go to the Point for the bird-watching.

Next morning, got up with the alarm and had coffee out on the deck with the Cyn. Apparently, Ishy had had a hard time gettng to sleep the night before, so she couldn't get up. So no trip to the park this morning, Fortunately, the park does the bird watch all the time, and the hawk-banding we wanted to see was also happening on Sunday. So no worries there, we had a nice leisurely morning. Two, three cups of coffee on the deck. I went in eventually and made eggs and toast for breakfast for Cyn and I. Ishy finally managed to wake up, poor thing and we decided to walk into the town center, buy some tour tickets and do a little shopping and walking around. It was a little drizzly out. We bought tour tickets for a historic ghost tour and a tour of the estate of Emlyn Physick. We bought some souvenirs, tooks some pictures and walked around some more. It was a really nice, relaxing day. We had lunch at a mock old "soda shoppe" (the most expensive lunch ever!), and headed back to the suite. Had short naps, chilled for a while, then headed back out a little before 7:00 for our tour. The tour was really interesting, and the estate was neat. This neat thing happened. While we were standing in the foyer of the house, the bottoms of my legs kept itching like something was tickling them. It felt like hair or something, like I had a loose thread on my pants. But it was both legs. Then, the lady conducting the tour tells us that the man that lived there loved his dogs and that sometimes the spirits of the dogs haunt the house and people can feel them rubbing against their legs! She hadn't even looked at me the whole time, and hadn't noticed me. How weird is that?!

We had a late dinner at a restaurant on the mall and headed home for bed. Once again, set the alarm for 7:30 AM to attempt to get up and see the birds again!!!