By the sea!

Hello from the Garden State! We're in New Jersey this week, Kim is attending the

National "Ag In The Classroom" conference in Atlantic City, and I tagged along. Kind of a vacation for us, we don't usually get to travel much. It is also serving as a "shakedown cruise " for China as we do not travel by air much at all. It looks like we need to get our packing skills sorted out! We had quite a few bags, but they were small. We had a good flight out, although getting up at 3AM to be in Des Moines in time catch a 7AM flight was a bit much. There were several others from Iowa on the plane, and we have got together some here, and we've also met people from all over the US.

Atlantic City is an interesting town, but so far we've not seen anything to bring us back again. We're not gamblers, so the casinos do not impress us. Seeing the ocean is nice, we both agreed we could sit and watch the waves for hours, something very elemental about the action and the sound. We walked through Caesars casino yesterday, and again it reminded us of a (very) bad science fiction movie as people sit in front of machines dropping in coins and pushing buttons, seemingly mesmerized by the flashing lights and spinning wheels of the slot machines. On the streets, there is a constant stream of tour buses bringing in more sheep to be sheared at the casinos. Sandwiched in between the big casinos are the delightfully tacky little tourist traps that are the heart and soul of a resort city like this. Some are clean nice looking shops and others are quite worn looking with tired looking merchandise as well. We took a walk down to the boardwalk about 1/2 mile from the hotel.

We all have an image on New Jersey as being one big suburb, but in fact the southern portion has a lot of farmland, as well as several large forested areas. This was quite obvious on the flight into AtlanticCity.