Gulf Oil Spill drives Southerners to the Jersey Shore

It may have been inevitable as BP and the Federal Government have fiddled while the Gulf of Mexico has been fouled by the oil spill. Southern tourists who would normally vacation along the afflicted shores of the Gulf are seeking other destinations. And many are headed for the Jersey Shore. This is good news for New Jersey tourism, but may be extra-bad news for Gulf towns whose only real economy is serving tourists.

Local tourism officials can't provide hard numbers, but cars from Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and other states below the Mason-Dixon Line appear to be in greater supply at the Shore this summer.

"I'm hearing a lot more southern accents this year," said Susan Martin, a reservations manager at the Golden Inn in Avalon. "And I just love the sound of it."

There has been an increase in the number of Southerners booking rooms, Martin said. They don't say why they are coming, she said, but many have identified themselves as first-timers.

The newcomers are finding their way largely on their own, say those in the tourism industry. New Jersey this year eliminated its national multimillion-dollar Shore promotional campaign, leaving resort towns complaining even before the gulf disaster about their inability to compete with rivals such as Ocean City, Md.

CRCHAIR's Wildwood Photos

Here are the photos that I took on our Wildwood vacation. Not the same quantity as Nomad, but hopefully as good quality.

Vacation Photos - The Full Set

After 38.09 miles walked on the boards, 15 animals from the claw machines, over 160,000 points earned at skeeball/videopoker/etc., and about 10 upload sessions to Flickr/YouTube, our vacation is over and we have returned to the Batcave. Tomorrow is the return to work and normality (such as it is). If you want to review where we have been and what we saw, click on the images below to see my whole photoset. CRChair's will be coming later.

Nomad gets the sign of the beast

Nomad was playing a game on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey and got an interesting score.