New Jersey & New York City January 28 - February 4, 2014

Why would anyone want to travel from mildly cool California to New Jersey and New York in February during one of the coldest winters there in recent memory? The answer is we had no choice. Actually Kathy and I did have a choice but after trying to obtain Super Bowl tickets through the ticket lottery for five years, I finally got picked. Even though we had to decide to purchase the tickets before the two teams in the Super Bowl were known, we figured we better jump at what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a Super Bowl. This Super bowl happened to be the first one held in an outdoor cold weather stadium.

We couldn’t go clear across the U.S. just for two or three days to see the big game so we planned a week around game day. This report is about everything we saw and did besides the Super Bowl. To read about our Super Bowl experience, click here.

We flew in to Philadelphia because it was much cheaper than flying into any of the New York City area airports. We picked up our rental car and drove about 100 miles to Atlantic City, New Jersey where we stayed at the historic Resorts Casino Hotel located right on the famous boardwalk. Resorts Casino was the first casino hotel inside of Atlantic City, and the first legal casino outside of Nevada opening in 1978. Before becoming Resorts International in 1968, the site was originally occupied by two three-story wooden Quaker rooming houses, the Chalfonte House and The Haddon House dating to 1868.

We woke up the next morning to find that it had snowed several inches overnight. We went for a short walk on the boardwalk and even though we came prepared with layers of winter clothes, snow boots, etc. the below zero wind chill cold hitting our faces was a new experience for us!

I was hoping to rent a four-wheel drive SUV but they were way more expensive than a sedan so the first day was going to be an adventure driving around on slushy roads. Before leaving Atlantic City, we drove by the Absecon Lighthouse and the famous Boardwalk Hall, formally known as the Historic Atlantic City Convention Hall, where many Miss America Pageants were held. They hadn't completely plowed the roads but we managed to make it on to the Garden State Turnpike which had been plowed and was clear. The skies were clear now so we were hoping that would be all the snow we had to deal with on this trip.

We left Atlantic City and headed for Howell, New Jersey to visit and stay with my friends Kevin and Pete. I was stationed with Kevin in Germany 34 years ago and had only visited him twice since. On the way to Howell, we saw the Tucker’s Island Lighthouse and stopped at Lakehurst Naval Air Station to see the huge airship hangars there as well as the site of the Hindenburg disaster. Unfortunately, due to the snow on the ground, the airship museum inside Hangar One was closed and the plaque on the ground marking the site where the Hindenburg crashed was not visible.

After arriving in Howell, Kevin took us on a driving tour to Asbury Park where they let us in to see the famous Stone Pony nightclub where Bruce Springsteen and other notable bands have played. It was closed during the day but they let us in to look around at all the memorabilia on the walls, etc. We also drove along the Jersey Shore, stopping at the Sea Girt Lighthouse, saw Bruce Springsteen’s house, saw the Navesink Twin Lighthouse from a distance and ended up climbing to the top of the Sandy Hook Lighthouse located in Fort Hancock. Sandy Hook is the oldest working lighthouse in America - 250 years old this year. That evening, we had dinner with Kevin and Pete at a nice restaurant in Asbury Park.

The next morning, we drove to Brooklyn and checked in to our hotel there. While driving in Brooklyn is not quite as stressful as driving in Manhattan, we still planned to leave the car at the hotel and use the subway to get around Manhattan.

Kathy and I had both applied online for the free tickets to the David Letterman taping for that afternoon but we never heard back about getting the tickets. In between flights to Philadelphia, Kathy got a call on her cell phone and after answering an easy trivia question was told we got the tickets. So after checking in, we hopped on the subway and made our way to the famous Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway and saw the Letterman taping. Guests were Dr. Phil, Danny (The Count) Koker and the Dum Dum Girls.

After the show we walked up Broadway which had been turned in to Super Bowl Boulevard with various Super Bowl related attractions. We ended up on Fifth Avenue by Macy’s and could see the Empire State Building just one block over. We’ve both been to the 86th Floor observation deck but I thought it would be fun to do it again. At that time of night in the middle of winter, even with Super Bowl fans in town, there was absolutely no line to go up to the observation deck. The view was beautiful and I realized that the two times I have been up there were both at night.

The next day, we took the subway back to Manhattan for a full day of sightseeing. We saw Federal Hall National Memorial on Wall Street (the site of George Washington’s inauguration as the first U.S. President), the almost completed Freedom Tower, the 9/11 Memorial (the 9/11 Museum wasn't due to open until May), Battery Park including Castle Clinton National Monument, the famous Flatiron and Metropolitan Life Insurance buildings at Madison Square and Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site.

My favorite artifacts in the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace NHS were Roosevelt’s glasses case, shirt and speech. All three items have bullet holes from an assassination attempt in Milwaukee in 1912 while former President Roosevelt was campaigning for a third Presidential term as a third party candidate. He was shot after exiting his car but still gave his speech which began: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” After checking out his own blood-stained shirt, he said: “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose.” He actually finished his 90 minute speech before going to the hospital where doctors decided to leave the bullet in him. These three artifacts as well as a heavy coat worn that day probably saved Roosevelt’s life.

We still had enough time to take the subway to the Lower East Side of Manhattan to see the Lower East Side Tenement Museum which included an excellent tour of two historic tenements. We ended up at a nice Italian restaurant on the border of the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. We did a lot of walking on this day so foot rubs were in order back at the hotel.

The next day we planned to see a few sights in New Jersey. The first stop was Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange. The most direct way to get there was to drive over the Brooklyn Bridge, through Manhattan and through the Holland Tunnel. Since it was Saturday, I figured the traffic through Manhattan wouldn’t be too stressful and it wasn’t. We made it through without even being honked at!

Kathy and I saw Edison’s first laboratory which had been moved from Menlo Park, New Jersey to Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan several years prior. I recently read a book about Edison and his inventions written by one of the Park Rangers at Edison NHP and have wanted to visit the site of Edison’s laboratory (now the NHP) for some time. I wasn’t disappointed. In its heyday, Edison’s laboratory/factory included 22 buildings on this site. Today, only the main laboratory and a few smaller buildings survive but there is much to see and do in these buildings.

The main laboratory has three floors you can walk through and includes Edison’s research library, music room and hundreds of his original inventions (over 300,000 artifacts and approximately five million documents are stored there). Walking through the shops with their old belt-driven machines was like stepping back in time. It was as if the workers just left one day in the middle of their work and left everything as you see it today. Some of the first versions of Edison’s inventions, such as the first phonograph, are on display.

Just about a mile from the laboratory is the mansion that Edison bought and lived in with his wife for the rest of his life. They called the mansion Glenmont and we got an almost personnel tour by a Park Ranger. It really was picturesque with all the snow on the surrounding grounds. After the tour, Kathy and I walked to the rear of the house and saw Thomas and Mina Edison’s graves. While Edison didn’t make good on a pay promise to my favorite inventor Nicola Tesla when Tesla worked for him, I still have to admire Edison’s genius and productivity - he accumulated 1,093 patents in his lifetime!

From East Orange we drove to Morristown to see Morristown National Historic Park. This park commemorates the sites of General Washington and the Continental army’s winter encampment of December 1779 to June 1780, where they survived through what would be the coldest winter on record. There are several separated sections to this park but the main attraction is the Ford Mansion that Washington used as his headquarters. We got another almost private tour of the mansion by a Park Ranger. We also saw Fort Nonsense where the Continental army camped nearby.

On the way back to Brooklyn, we drove a different route over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and ended up in Coney Island. My dad grew up in Coney Island and I was hoping to see two of the houses where he lived in a gated community called Seagate. Unfortunately, the guard wouldn’t let us in as only residents and guests are allowed in. I heard that many of the houses in Seagate were damaged by the wind and flooding of Super Storm Sandy the year before.

In Coney Island, we saw the famous parachute jump ride, the AAA ballpark, the boardwalk and had a hot dog at Nathan’s Famous. It was after dark when we made our way back to the hotel driving through the heart of Brooklyn. There were endless rows of apartment buildings and I can see how Brooklyn is the most populous New York borough.

On Sunday morning before we took the subway and bus to the Super Bowl, we drove to a park on the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge for a great view of the bridge and Manhattan. From there, we drove through downtown Brooklyn to Prospect Park which was designed by famous landscape architect Fredrick Law Olmstead. Olmstead also designed Central Park in Manhattan and many other famous parks and landscapes.

I remember my grandfather taking me for a walk in Prospect Park when my mother and I stopped to visit my grandparents on our way to Germany just before my fourth birthday (that trip was one of my earliest memories). We also were able to drive by my grandparents’ apartment that I stayed in during that visit located just a few blocks from Prospect Park.

After driving back to our hotel, we took the subway to Manhattan and had lunch near where the bus taking us to the Super Bowl would pick us up. After lunch, we had about an hour to kill so we walked several blocks to Astor Place and Washington Square Park. Washington Square is located in Greenwich Village and has a big fountain in the middle and Washington's Arch on one side. Several New York University buildings are situated around Washington Square. My aunt told me she has many fond memories of going to college there. The park was a gathering area for the Beat Generation, Folk, and Hippie movements in the 1950's and 1960's. On this day, there was a man braving the cold and overcast weather playing a baby grand piano for tips near the fountain.

Many people were predicting a severe blizzard for the Super Bowl but it was clear and 49° F (9° C) at game time. By the time we got back to our hotel around midnight, it had started raining. When we woke up Monday morning, we saw that our weather luck had run out and there was several inches of snow on the ground. We had planned to drive to Long Island and see a lighthouse on Fire Island and the famous Levittown housing project but the streets near the hotel were not even plowed yet. We were leery of driving and even checked in to the possibility of staying another night in Brooklyn.

We finally decided to drive straight to our next nights’ hotel near Trenton New Jersey skipping Long Island and the Edison Art Deco Memorial Tower in Edison, New Jersey. Our freeway onramp in Brooklyn was closed so we had to take some alternate routes but after limping along at 18 MPH on the New Jersey Turnpike because of snow on the road, we made it to our motel in the afternoon and were barely able to drive to get dinner that evening. We had also hoped to see the New Jersey State Capitol and Old Barracks Museum in Trenton but it was just too hazardous driving around.

The next day, the weather and roads were clear and we made the short drive to the Philadelphia airport without incident. This was one of the coldest and snowiest winters in recent memory on the East Coast so we were happy that we only had one day where the weather ruined our plans. There was a big snowstorm a day or so before we arrived and a big snowstorm the day after we left causing many flight delays and cancellations so our timing was pretty good. Not only was this another great trip but it made me appreciate our mild winters in California even more!

To view 67 photos from this trip, click here: photos.