21 incredible outdoor N.J. day trips you can take right now
Updated May 07, 2021;
Posted May 02, 2021
Thursday, June 20, 2019. Visitors to Princeton Battlefield State Park find fog rising early in the evening.Michael Mancuso | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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Great news, New Jersey: It’s warm outside!
Spring has sprung in the Garden State and summer is around the corner. It’s time to shakeoff the cabin fever of winter, embrace the growing freedom of an increasingly vaccinated world and explore what New Jersey has to offer.
Need a few ideas? Here’s a list of day trips to take in each of New Jersey’s 21 counties. It’s by no means comprehensive but hey, we can’t give all of our favorite places away. Happy adventuring!
What to expect when visiting N.J.’s state and federal parks in the spring and summer of 2021
Updated 10:00 AM;
Today 10:00 AM
People walk their dog along a trail at Double Trouble State Park in Berkeley and Lacey Townships in May 2020. Lori M. Nichols | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
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Last year, when the coronavirus pandemic drove an unprecedented number of people to parks across the state, it was exactly what state officials wanted to see even if they weren’t prepared for it.
“No one I think imagined just how intense . the increase in visitation would be,” Shawn LaTourette, the acting commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, told NJ Advance Media. “Not because any agency or apparatus of government wasn’t ready to help its citizens, but because the spaces themselves don’t hold all the people that wanted to partake in them.”
A Shad, Shad Story: The Annual Springtime “Shad Run” Is On
Feel like a road trip? Then head west to experience an on fire fishery that’s occurring on the Delaware River from Trenton north to Worthington State Forest in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. Going into its second weekend of rod’n reel migration mayhem, the annual springtime “Shad Run” will continue through the Memorial Day weekend and possibly beyond, and there are already reports of this acier-toned, well-muscled migrant fresh in from the Atlantic already being caught up at the Montague-Milford Bridge in Sussex County.
Big numbers of American shad, the largest member of the herring clan, are on the upriver spawning trek, and these movements usually occur in waves, with bucks (males) first followed by females (roes). The initial push is in progress, with a second most likely underway, as there are reports of fish being caught around Bordentown below Trenton. The later run will have a mix of buc