The most boring tourist trap in NJ (Opinion)

Everybody and everything has a downside, right?

Now New Jersey is the state I was born and raised in and moved back home to a number of times. So clearly I like it. Yes, it’s corrupt. Yes, taxes are too high. Yes, it has problems. Plenty of them.

But the people have a work ethic amazingly strong and a personality brave and loyal. There are major teams that play here and major concerts that come here. We have the Jersey Shore and a world-class amusement park. The food is exceptional.

But everything has a downside.

Which came up in an article on farandwide.com that looked for the worst, most boring tourist trap in each state.

Some examples from other states.

Indiana has the world’s largest ball of paint. It’s a 5-ounce baseball-turned 2.5-ton tourist attraction by covering it in 24,000 coats of paint until it was ginormous. It hangs boringly in a barn of a family where the father and son started painting the baseball back in 1977 and is open to the public to come and gaze and wonder why they bothered.

In Brandon, Iowa, sits a 14-foot-long by 9-foot-wide frying pan you can visit. It’s not even the largest frying pan in the world. It’s just the largest frying pan in Iowa.

Kansas has their most boring tourist attraction in Cawker City in the form of the world’s largest ball of twine. It started in 1953 and has twine added to it every summer so as to never lose the title, which, apparently, no one else wants anyway.

So what’s the dumbest, most boring tourist attraction in the state of New Jersey?

First of all, how do you define boring? MSN once declared Ocean City as New Jersey’s most boring town. Why?

It was partly because of older people living there and partly because of not having enough things to do. OK, it has the boardwalk? Yes, yet in the winter there’s very little. But if it was points off because of being a dry town they weren’t taking into account the huge liquor store right across the bridge in Somers Point. Trust me, I lived there, no one is not drinking there who wants to.

Turns out the most boring tourist attraction in New Jersey according to farandwide.com is Lucy The Elephant in Margate.

I think I’d have to agree.

Lucy is a six-story-tall structure made to look like an elephant on the outside but with rooms you can actually sleep in (and are occasionally rented out) on the inside. It stands as America’s oldest surviving roadside tourist attraction having been built in 1881.

It was used over its many decades as a tavern, hotel and business office. Now it’s just kind of there as a dumb tourist attraction. People who live in South Jersey treat it with a reverence usually reserved for something like the Great Pyramid or the Grand Canyon.

Boring indeed. But if you want to say you’ve been inside a 65-foot elephant that’s a historical landmark here’s their website.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

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