Discovering New Jersey

The Jersey Shore town is home to both the annual National Marbles Tournament, and the National Marbles Hall of Fame.

There's actually a law in Mount Holly prohibiting psychics, so a pitch-black "séance" is combined with a ghost hunt to maximize the entertainment factor.

Daily walking tours of the Sandy Hook Lighthouse are offered every half hour, up and down 95 steps plus a nine-rung ladder.

While the Down Jersey Folklife Program can't present every ethnic community at once, it does attempt to bridge the gap between visual and performing arts, which had once been more interconnected than they now are.

Every kind of critter is here, from fossilized arthropods to big, live bugs like millipedes, scorpions, hermit crabs, and yes, tarantulas.

The museum's gift shop offers authenticated pieces of the boardwalk for patrons to purchase and take home.

Many people who tour this museum on the Maurice River tell its curator that they're most interested in what's going on around the working waterfront that particular day.

The grounds were formerly used as a quarantine station for hooved animals coming into the United States, and their history stretches "from the footprints of the animals to the footsteps of the people."

Even though "Dickens Fest" is not necessarily a moneymaker for the theatre company, it keeps tourism coming into the village, and was notable enough to have an encore as one of Historic Smithville's main attractions this fall.

The model train museum Northlandz is fascinating for adults, but one of its longtime goals has been to provide "a chance to expose kids to this hobby," especially relevant in the era of electronic devices.