2 NJ Day Trips

This weekend Christine and I took two New Jersey day trips.

Saturday we started out just driving south on the turnpike. We got restless by the time we got to Trenton and stopped for lunch at a pretty cool bar in downtown called the Trenton Social. They seemed to have a lot of live music and some neat artwork. The food was okay and we got a vibe for what the Trenton hipster scene was like. Next we drove through historic Trenton but didn't stop, as we made our way to the antique mall / flea market near Lambertville called the Golden Nugget. This is worth checking out, especially if you are into that sort of thing. Next we crossed over the Delaware into New Hope, a neat little boutique town, but we couldn't find parking near the downtown area so we went to a winery, Unionville. Unionville had some great wine, but some of it was rather expensive, with a Chardonnay topping $50. We got an Albarino and some white blend called Eureka. We also got a red blend I forgot the name of at $22. Since we were on a winery kick, we next went to Old York Winery, Terhune Orchard winery in Princeton, and also Hopewell winery. Hopewell was my favorite of the day, I especially liked their spumante secco. Most of their wine is in an Italian style and they also serve brick oven pizza. The coolest thing of the day was then going back to Trenton to find Rat's Restaurant in the middle of Garden of Sculpture. This is probably the best restaurant in New Jersey, set in a really cool sculpture garden. I had smoked duck and Christine had scallops. We also had a lobster crepe and a bottle of wine. Everything was priced reasonably.

Rat's in Trenton

Sunday we wanted to go hiking with the dog, so we went to the other Great Falls National Park, in Paterson NJ. This was a lot of fun, but a bust in some ways too. We tried to head towards a hiking trail that only ended up going half a mile, so then we went downtown. We then looked for a bridge and went through a shady area to get to the back of the falls. This was really cool and we broke into a closed part of the park with about six or seven other people who were standing on the part of the chain link fence they had knocked down to let us over. We took some cool pictures from the park, and then we were pretty exhausted, after walking three or four miles, so we went back to the car. Paterson is well known for their Arab food, we went to get some Kebabs on Main St after that.

Great Falls in Paterson

Kebab spot in Paterson