East Coast Trip

[crlyn324]

This is a great board!!My husband and I live in New Jersey. We want to take a family vacation in December with our baby. He will be 16 months old in December. We will probably go the 1st or 2nd week in December and are looking for fun family things to do or go. If the final destination is far, we would be willing to stop somewhere and overnight it for one night.
Prefer to stay on the East Coast, FL and Maine are too far, we only have a week.
Any suggestions?

[AZBuck]

Welcome aboard the RoadTrip America Forums!

At a year and a half, the main thing is to keep it simple for your son, but still fun for the adults. When my own grandsons were that age (not very long ago) their likes were pretty much limited to the zoo, the beach, and with the older one, trains. You probably can't get far enough south to find warm ocean water in December, and although Maine is only a day's drive from New Jersey, it will be very cold and not conducive to outdoor activity. I think you'd have a great time exploring the Delmarva Peninsula, which would let you play on the beach (if not in the water) see some wildlife and some famous wild ponies, take a ferry ride across Delaware Bay, and visit some historic locations,

The basic idea would be to head down to Cape May at the southern tip of New Jersey and take the Cape May-Lewes Ferry over to Lewes, Delaware, spend some time strolling the boardwalk in Rehoboth and the beach at Cape Henlopen State Park and/or Delaware Seashore State Park. You would then continue down the peninsula to Chincoteague Wildlife Refuge which has some very nice nature walks and a great visitor's center in addition to its famous wild pony herds. On the way in or out of Chincoteague, you might also want to stop and tour the small museum and visitor's center at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. Unfortunately, the ferries to Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay stop operations around mid-October, but keep it in mind for another trip. If you continue southward, you eventually come to the end of the peninsula and would cross over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to Norfolk, VA, home to the Virginia Zoo. Traveling back up the west coast of the Chesapeake Bay, some possible stops include Colonial Williamsburg, and the National Mall in Washington, DC.

You can take a trip like that at a very leisurely pace (say a week), but never be farther than a few hours drive from home at most.

AZBuck