Lewes is an old town located right on the Delaware Bay and is the southern terminal of the Cape May (NJ)-Lewes ferry. The ferry terminal in NJ is about two miles from the end of the Garden State Parkway. Now normally, we would take our vehicle on the ferry to Delaware. However, this time we did something a little different. The ferry terminal has a parking lot which is free to ferry passengers. You can leave your car there, and buy foot passenger tickets to go across. All they ask is that if you are going to leave your vehicle overnight or longer, you give them you license plate and registration # when you buy your ticket. It's cheaper to go this way and you avoid waiting in line in the vehicle lanes. Basically we walked right on about five minutes before sailing. We had a pleasant hour and one-half cruise, and my sister-in-law picked us up at the Delaware terminal.
The Cape May-Lewes ferry
As usual, we had a great time. We went to the beach twice; there is a state park near Lewes called Cape Henlopen which has a beautiful beach. In fact I have assurances from Little Mark, who visited the following week (Michelle's sister is his Grandma), that the sand is highly diggable. We also did a bunch of shopping in the outlets which are located in and around Lewes. I kind of like outlets because while Michelle shops for women's clothes, I can usually find a men's store nearby to wander through. In fact, one of the outlet malls in Lewes has a Black and Decker outlet store. Talk about a "manly" outlet!
We also visited a place called Dover Downs. It's a harness racing track combined with a stock car track that hosts NASCAR twice a year. I believe when it's in NASCAR mode it calls itself Dover Speedway. Anyhow, they have a casino there. The casino has no traditional table games with dealers, but it did have some interesting blackjack machines. Instead of a single person machine like the older blackjack machines and video poker, they have six seats in front of a video screen. Each seat has buttons in front of it for all the possible choices: hit, stand, double, split, etc. When the game is played, a virtual dealer appears on the screen and you sort of interact with her/him. The advantage is in the companionship of your friends at the same table as you would have in a "live" game, with all the kibitzing and conversation among you which makes losing your money a little less painful. We played for a while, my sister-in-law and I lost some money, Michelle won a little - we had fun.
The next day, Michelle's sister had a dinner engagement so we were on our own for dinner. We headed to our favorite crab joint: Lazy Susan's. They are not far from my sister-in-law's house and are a classic shore crab shack. While readers may remember from my tales of Alaska, my all-time favorite crabs are the Northwestern Dungeness variety, East Coast blue crabs are nothing to sneer at and are delicious in their own right. Lazy Susan's serves them in the traditional way: one sits at a picnic style table covered with brown wrapping paper and the crabs are dumped by the dozen right on the table. Wooden mallets are provided to crack the claws to get at the sweet meat inside, and plastic knives are there to dig out the meat from the body.
Now there is some technique involved in eating blue crabs, mainly in how to open the crab shell and what parts to discard, but the helpful staff at Susan's will be glad to demonstrate the proper "moves". It's not hard to learn in any case.
We ordered a dozen crabs with corn on the cob for an accompaniment and they were delicious.
The next day we were driven to the ferry and headed home to New Jersey.
