Double Trouble...

Yesterday Abi and I had a little adventure, we went off in search of Cranberry Bogs in New Jersey. We'd heard that the closest, most visitor friendly bog was in a place called the Double Trouble State Park, so that's where we went.

The drive out there was great, luckily we didn't have to drive through Manhattan this time, instead we got to enjoy the views of it as we drove down to Staten Island and across the Verrazano Bridge...

It wasn't long before we were out of the city and onto the Garden State Parkway, a big stretch of road that goes through some lovely areas in New Jersey. Then after nearly 2 hours we reached Double Trouble...

The entrance to the State Park was just off the main road, but once you were in the car park and under the canopy of pine trees it felt like you were miles away from any traffic or anything.

There were lots of little wooden buildings dotted around under all the trees, probably left over from when the State Park was a working farm...

 We weren't quite sure where the bogs were, so we asked a very friendly Park Ranger (who was sitting in a little wooden hut with a very nice porch) and he pointed us in the right direction.

 We thought we'd come at the perfect time, the harvest was happening this weekend and the park range said that the bogs were being flooded ready for harvest, so we were expecting to see a big lake of water with lots of floating cranberries in it, but I think we were a wee bit too early...

The bogs weren't completely flooded yet, and the cranberries were still attached to their vines, you could see some of them under the water...

During the harvest all the cranberries get detached from the vines, then float on the water and get collected up and taken to be sorted. All that would probably be happening today, but the State Park is closed today so we wouldn't have been able to see it anyway.

The water was flooding the bogs at one end (by the white building) and then passing through channels and flowing into a second bog, and then a third, and then passing back out into a steam. I'm not sure if the water gets recycled or not, but the water flowing both in and out had an amazing red colour to it...

 It was pretty disappointing not to see the bogs as we'd expected to, but it was lovely to be able to walk around and get an idea of how the whole cranberry farming process works...

 It wasn't a completely wasted trip, we got to see a beautiful area of New Jersey, learn something new and we managed to get a bit shop done at Walmart... and it was a beautifully sunny day too!