Weekend Wise: Visit a State Park

  Collect one family, or a few close friends and take a trip to your local state park for a low cost weekend activity!

 Our trip consisted of myself, my husband Aus, and our daughter Brenda traveling to Batsto Historical Village in Batsto, NJ. We have two other children - but both of them were busy having weekend fun that didn't include mom and dad (hanging out with friends - also free).

 Founded in 1766, Batsto was first an iron forge, and then a glass works, and a genteman's farm. The village is restored and also contains a museum and visitor's center that educates the public about life in the Pine Barrens, and Pine Barrens history. Also, if you live in New Jersey or plan on visiting here, you might want to pick up a State Parks sticker book. This passport-style book is free, and has a place for a sticker of each park. Kids of all ages (and adults, too!) will enjoy collecting  a sticker from each park for the book.  When you collect ten, twenty, and all thirty-six state park stickers, you get free prizes.  So far we only have five - but Batsto is one of them!

When you first come in to the museum at Batsto, you see a display of the various Pine Barrens species. They play a realistic sounding recording of the various sounds of the forest as you walk through this area.

There are also displays of Indian artifacts, worker's houses, and various artifacts from life in Batsto village during the 1800s. 

Brenda was amused by the combination of the owners of Batsto's names - Cox and Ball.

 This timeline showed the history of the village, who had owned it, and what was manufactured during that time period.

At the bottom you can see some actual cannon balls manufactured at Batsto during the Revolutionary War.

  Lifesize cutouts of the owners in front of some stylized houes provided a good photo opportunity.  

Just outside the museum, the village stretches out through the lovely landscape of the pines. Just in case you forget where you are, though, someone has helpfully nailed this sign announcing that you are in a NJ State Forest. Wharton State Forest, to be exact. 

 The Batsto  mansion still stands proud after all these years. They offer guided tours of the interior for a small fee (two dollars for adults, one dollar for children), but we didn't take one today as we arrived too late. The mansion has thirty two rooms, fourteen of which they show you on the tour. The house is done in the Italianate style of architecture, and was renovated to this appearance by owner Joseph Wharton (yep, they named the forest after him) in the late 19th century. The original part of the house (the part that existed before they built on with the  renovations) is much older.

 The lake and waterway were very important to the production of iron - bog ore can still be found in the lakebed. The water was also used to power mills, and to transport goods from place to place. Today, Batsto Lake remains a very beautiful place. We saw several people fishing while we were there - and occasionally, there's a boater or two. 

Ducks seem to enjoy the waters - though today we didn't see any, which is just as well because we didn't bring any bread for them. We did spot some hyper hummingbirds that were way too fast to photograph and a black and blue butterfly that also escaped the lens. 

  We had a great day! And it was all for a very reasonable price. Here's what we spent:

State park/museum/village: Free!

Snacks: $2.00 for three pieces of rock candy, and four sticks of hard candy.

Lunch: We stopped at Stewart's Root Beer and had a delicious lunch of cheese steaks, mozzarella sticks, bruschetta, and rootbeer floats - $30.00 for three people. 

There's always plenty of things to do at State Parks - check out the ones in your area! I know we're going to be traveling to more parks to try and fill our sticker book up the rest of the way.