A weekend trip to Atlantic City…
21 minute read
January 21, 2022, 5:27 PM
From January 13-15, Elyse and I took a weekend trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey. We had been to Atlantic City twice before, both times for a single day each about a year ago. Our first visit was part of a larger weekend trip where we did a little arc across the Philadelphia and South Jersey areas, and Atlantic City was what we did on the last day. The most memorable thing about that trip was watching my drone sail away on South Missouri Avenue, go out of contact, and then locating it about four blocks away, on the roof of Angelo’s Fairmount Tavern. The second trip was a day trip that occurred two weeks later, where we made a day out of the need to retrieve the drone after the folks at Angelo’s had kindly retrieved it off of their roof for us.
This time, we were actually staying in Atlantic City. We stayed at Caesars by Elyse’s request, as she wanted to film the elevators there, which are keycarded (i.e. we stayed there as guests in order to get the access that we needed). I didn’t mind the price at Caesars, nor was it a bad place to stay, so that worked out pretty well. This trip was mostly dedicated to photography, just like the previous adventures in Atlantic City, but with more time to play around. I’m not too much into gambling, but we did make some time for that. We also made plans to get together with family while we were up there, which was the driver for our plans. Therefore, on Thursday, we drove up and more or less made a beeline for Atlantic City. Then on Friday, we had our adventure day. Then on Saturday, we traveled back west to fly the drone, do a few other things, and visit family.
However, on Thursday, Elyse wanted to stop in at Deptford Mall in order to get a screen protector for a new phone that she was getting, as well as film an elevator. I am not unfamiliar with this mall, as I went to this place with my parents back in the early 1980s, and have been a number of times within the past ten years. The mall bears very little resemblance to what it did when I was a child (though there is a Bamberger’s labelscar on the first floor), but it’s still a good, solid mall.
Some things caught my interest while we were there:
I always enjoy running over small pieces of trash when I can do it safely. In this case, I was aiming to fun over the coffee cup, but missed. However, I nailed it when it came to that juice box. (And for those wondering, I have absolutely done this with a bus as well – one of my prouder moments was running over a full water bottle and hearing it burst under my left front tire.)
This is the sink area in the men’s restroom at Round1, which is a Dave & Buster’s-like place. When I posted it to Instagram, I captioned it, “File this under ‘sinks for ugly people’.” After all, it’s a very rare thing to have a restroom that doesn’t have mirrors over the sink.
I suppose that this is a reminder that despite its modern appearance, Deptford Mall is almost fifty years old (it opened in 1975). Elyse wanted to pose with this fire alarm pull station to show that it is taller than she is. This used to be the standard height for pull stations, but that standard height became much lower in the 1980s.
Elyse got a photo of me holding her screen protector and my own phone with one of the demo phones at the Verizon store in Deptford Mall. This was taken on some sort of Google Pixel device.
From here, after a quick stop at Wawa, we headed to Atlantic City. After I missed my exit and we had to take a bunch of local roads to get to Atlantic City on our day trip last year, I always appreciate getting the navigation right. Generally speaking, if you go through Deptford after you get off of I-295, you’re doing it right. On that trip, I didn’t realize that the Atlantic City Expressway designation did not reach 295, and thus we went a bit out of the way (seeing signs for Trenton tipped me off that I had overshot), and we ended up going through Mount Laurel and a few other cities that I wouldn’t have gone through if I had actually used Google Maps in the first place rather than thinking that I knew where I was going.
In any event, once we got to Atlantic City, we first stopped at Angelo’s and got dinner to go for later. We decided a long time ago when we first started considering this trip that we would definitely patronize Angelo’s on our trip, as Angelo really did us a solid in getting the drone down from the roof after it landed there. We ended up getting the meatball parmesan, which consists of two giant meatballs with cheese and tomato sauce. That was more than enough for us to share, and was our dinner later on.
Finishing up at Angelo’s, we then found Caesars, unloaded our luggage, parked, and got checked in. We had room 797, on the north side of the Forum Tower:
Our room at Caesars. Compared to most hotel rooms that we’ve stayed in, I feel like this room was wider, but was also shorter front to back, with a smaller bathroom than most. And the beds were tiny. I could not imagine two people sleeping on these beds.
Elyse shows off the one-piece toilet in the bathroom, while I am visible in the mirror taking the photo.
Woomy and David sit on my bed at Caesars. Woomy didn’t like the room at all and made his opinions known, while David was just kind of unimpressed.
Gelato display at Tazza Cafe in the lobby of Caesars. Elyse and I shared a cup of gelato on the first night.
Elyse shows off the really big bananas that we found at Tazza Cafe that we got for later.
Statue of Caesar Augustus in the lobby of Caesars. I had always assumed that Big Julie was the namesake of the facility rather than Augustus, so that was a bit of a surprise.
Elyse checks the payphone in the lobby and discovers, to both of our surprise, that the phone still works.
After we got settled in our hotel room, I had intended to go out and do some night photography, but it was just too cold, so I skipped it. So instead, we explored around the Caesars property. Caesars is a very large facility, and has a lot of little spaces in it. The casino is kind or right in the middle, and spans two floors. There are also entertainment spaces in the facility, as well as plenty of shopping and dining. I was surprised to find out that Atlantic City casinos allow smoking, with smoking permitted in up to a quarter of the total floor area. I also discovered that not all of the games were available outside of the smoking area. The only games available outside of the smoking area were slots and video poker. If you wanted to play roulette or any kind of table game, you had to go into the smoking area. However, the smell of cigarette smoke was noticeable throughout the entire casino, even on the upper floor, which did not allow smoking. I would definitely support banning smoking in casinos, but apparently, the state is in no hurry to do so, even after a year of casinos’ being required to go smoke-free as a COVID mitigation measure.
As far as playing in the casino went, I’m not that big of a gambler. I played with $20, and hit the slot machines. I played a number of different machines, and ultimately lost about $10-$12 of that money. I discovered one thing pretty quickly about slots: they were no fun, and just served to piss me off, as I watched my money disappear at the press of a button. I suppose that slots aren’t fun for me because I know too much about how they work, after listening to a podcast about how casinos work, explaining that slots were basically a random number generator, and all of the spinning wheels and such were just for show, i.e. your fate is sealed as soon as you press the button. And that’s no fun. Then the video poker was a bit of a non-starter for me, as I don’t know how to play poker. I just looked at that machine and was like, “Um…” and walked away. Eventually, Elyse and I found the roulette game. It used a real wheel and a real ball, but was fully automated, requiring no employee to operate. We sat down at this machine and put our cards in, and quickly realized that you’re just betting on where the ball will land. Seems pretty easy. My strategy was pretty straightforward: just dance my fingers across the touchscreen and bet on a bunch of numbers. And I did pretty well that way, turning my last six or seven bucks out of that initial $20 into $44 by the time we were finished. I resented that the roulette wheel was only available in the smoking section, but we had fun.
The next day, Elyse and I each had our own separate agendas. We got up, had breakfast, and got going. Her plan was to take a New Jersey Transit commuter train from Atlantic City to Philadelphia to see a friend that she had met at MAGFest the week before. Meanwhile, my plan was to stay in Atlantic City and photograph various landmarks with the SLR and the drone. Therefore, I would be going around unsupervised for about nine hours while Elyse was in Philadelphia.
But first, now that it was light out, I took an opportunity to check out the view from our room:
The view from room 797 at Caesars. Isn’t that a beaut.
A few folks commented on the allegedly bad view when I posted it to Facebook, commenting that it looked like the worst room in the place, or that they hoped that we were being paid to stay there. Truth be told, I didn’t care too much about the view. Sure, you really only got a good view of the HVAC equipment, but other than to take the photo of the view, we never looked out the window. Most of the time that we were in the room, it was dark out. Though I was slightly amused because I always figured that these sorts of views only existed on TV for comedic purposes. Who knew that they existed in real life as well.
In any case, once I dropped Elyse off at the train station, I went right to work, heading towards the eastern end of Atlantic City. On the way, I spotted this:
Yes, that is a “no left turn” sign printed over a former “do not enter” sign at the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Ohio Avenue. I posted it to the there is NO way that is MUTCD-compliant group on Facebook, and captioned it, “Always remember the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.” The best comment there was, “Two more Rs: Resurface before you Repurpose.” I can’t disagree with that.
In any event, my first flight centered around the Madison Hotel:
I had high hopes for that based on that roof sign, but unfortunately, it was not to be, as the sunlight was not facing the right way, the sign was missing some of its cover, and it was boxed in by the surrounding architecture. The photo of the penthouse was pretty spot-on, though.
The view from the immediate vicinity of the Madison Hotel.
I also got a good lesson in navigating this drone in the wind, as Atlantic City was pretty windy. Unlike my previous drone, the Mavic Mini, the Air 2S has some more weight to it, and doesn’t get kicked around in the wind like typically happens to the Mini. It was able to maintain its station in the wind just fine, though movements around the area were a bit slower. In calm air, it can move at around 40 mph, but in the wind, it topped out at around 6 mph. The moral of that story is to make sure that you have plenty of power to get back home, because it’s going to take a while to get there. But I managed to get the drone back home safely after every single flight, i.e. it didn’t end up on Angelo’s roof again at the end of the day.
Finishing at the Madison Hotel, I headed over to Resorts Casino Hotel, setting up about a block away from the building, on the other side of their massive surface parking lot. This one had some personal significance for me, as Mom has spoken for many years about how she worked as a server at this hotel in the summer of 1970, back when it was known as Chalfonte-Haddon Hall, and described all of the patronizing and blatantly sexist ways that both the patrons and the staff treated her there – stuff that would get the patrons kicked out and the staff fired today. In any event, I had done my research beforehand to make sure that I had the right building, and up I went.
Resorts Casino Hotel, the former Chalfonte-Haddon Hall.
The newer hotel tower at Resorts, which opened in 2004. That surprised me, because based on the dated looking architecture, I would have thought it was much older than that.
Then I flew a little further out, over the water:
Steel Pier, an amusement park built on a boardwalk pier.
The eastern end of Atlantic City, viewed from slightly offshore.
Atlantic City from offshore, facing approximately northwest.
Atlantic City from just offshore, facing approximately north.
Flying back to the launch point. If you look really carefully (i.e. zoom in really well), you can see the HR-V parked on the side of the road near the middle of the photograph, and then I’m standing right next to it.
After landing, I repositioned the HR-V to get a better line of sight on the Showboat and the Hard Rock. That’s one thing that I like about going to resort towns during their off-season periods: no one cares about parking. I’ve noticed that in Virginia Beach, Ocean City in Maryland, Asbury Park, and Atlantic City. Off-season, when nobody is there, they’re just grateful to have you there, and parking enforcement is nonexistent. It is a free-for-all when it comes to parking, just as long as you’re not stupid about it. All of those “no parking” signs were merely suggestions, especially when I was within sight of the car at all times. If it tells you anything, I didn’t pay a single parking meter the entire time I was there. In this instance, I parked on Atlantic Avenue when I repositioned, which was a little bit further away than I had initially anticipated. However, that further distance gave me a better line of sight than if I had been closer. In other words, it wasn’t what I had initially planned, but it worked.
I also couldn’t help but make a post on Facebook about the situation that I found myself in, driving around all of the real-life streets that the properties on the Monopoly board are named for. I said, “Considering that the Monopoly properties are named after streets in Atlantic City, it feels strange driving around the city and seeing the namesakes of the various spots on the game board. I turned down St. James Place today, and couldn’t help but think that I wouldn’t pay $180 for that crappy little street. Then Baltic Avenue is a pretty decent road, and that one ought to cost way more than $60.”
In any event, I launched my drone, and was off to explore some more with my little eye in the sky:
Flying over to the Showboat and the Hard Rock.
The Showboat, with its delightfully dated architecture. As I understand it, the Showboat is no longer a casino, and has repurposed the former casino space for more family-friendly activities, making it bear a closer resemblance to a Dave & Buster’s.
The Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, formerly the Trump Taj Mahal.
The view facing approximately north as the drone flies back to its launch site.
I then repositioned again, heading over to the Absecon Lighthouse. I had photographed this landmark before on my second trip to Atlantic City (the day trip), and ended up using more photos of the flags in front of the lighthouse than the lighthouse itself. At that time, I suspected that it would be a better subject for the drone, but I had no drone on that particular adventure. Now, I was ready to fly, and fly it I did. However, I also considered it to be too cold to stand outside and fly it like an adult, so I sat in the car with the heat on full blast and flew it from in there.
Close-up showing the Fresnel lens at the top of the lighthouse.
The view of the HR-V after landing. I ran out of battery power while I was flying on the far side of the lighthouse relative to my position in the car (the wind takes a toll on power due to the need for stationkeeping), and it went into a forced landing. Thankfully, I had a very good line of sight to it, and was able to guide it right back without incident, landing vertically next to the car.
I then repositioned again, to the end of Pacific Avenue, and launched one more time:
The view off of the east end of Atlantic City.
View across Absecon Inlet between Atlantic City (left) and Brigantine (right).
I then landed and pulled out the SLR for some more shots:
Lamppost on the eastern end of the boardwalk.
One of several jetties east of the boardwalk in Absecon Inlet.
Horizontal traffic signal with trombone mast at the intersection of Pacific Avenue and New Hampshire Avenue. This intersection is unique because the traffic signals are permanently on flash, with all yellow bulbs for traffic on Pacific Avenue, and all red bulbs for traffic on New Hampshire Avenue. Horizontal traffic signals are fairly common in Atlantic City in general.
I then left the resort area and headed west on US 30 a bit. I wanted to reshoot a wind farm that I had previously photographed with the drone on my first visit to Atlantic City, and I also wanted to check up on the Fine Petro station that was previously featured in the Abandoned Gas Station set in Photography.
As far as the wind farm went, I feel like I was a bit too conservative, but it looked all right:
I feel like for a wind farm, I really need to shoot it from the ground looking up. I could get that sort of access at a facility up in Pennsylvania, but the last time we went, the weather wasn’t cooperating, so we couldn’t. When I got up close last time, the photos were less than impressive. But I did get a selfie:
Then the Fine Petro station was pretty much as I expected. I figured that it would be one of three scenarios. Either it would be unchanged, the canopy would be removed, or the site would be fully cleared. It turned out to be the second scenario:
And behind the building, I found the busted up remains of signage from when this was a Gulf station:
If you look at the historic imagery for this location on Google Street View, you can see the Gulf signage in place.
After this, I had one more stop that I had planned to make on the way to Wawa for a meal: the sign for the Chelsea Baptist Church in front of the Tropicana. It’s a big sign towering over the street, perfect for droning:
The big “CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS” sign on the top of Chelsea Baptist Church.
The sign for the Tropicana next to the Chelsea Baptist Church sign. I considered it a nice juxtaposition of “the profane and the sacred”.
I will be the first to admit that these photos didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. The reason was the angle of the sun due to the late hour of the day. The sun was low in the sky when I got over to the church, and that meant that the sun was shining more or less horizontally onto the sign, which I felt blew out a lot of the details. And that was my fault, because I had intended to get this one, and then forgot it until I was on my way to Wawa to get dinner, and spotted it again. Fortunately, it’s not like I can’t ever go to Atlantic City again, and I also don’t see this place going away any time soon. So I’ll go up again.
I then flew away from the church and got more overview shots.
Atlantic City, viewed from more or less directly above the church, facing approximately west. Note the low height of the sun.
Atlantic City, taken over the ocean, facing east.
Atlantic City, taken over the ocean, facing west.
Dome on the roof of the Tropicana.
The drone lands back at its launch site, on the north side of the 2900 block of Atlantic Avenue.
I then went to Wawa, and then went back to the hotel room. It was starting to get dark, and I was hungry. The plan was to offloaded my photos to the cloud, and wait out the time while it finished getting dark before doing some night photography. While I was offloading photos, Elyse checked to make sure that I hadn’t busted my drone (oh, ye of little faith), so I sent her this back:
I also had my dinner from Wawa, and then I inadvertently took a nap. Clearly, I needed the rest. I ended up staying at the hotel room until around 10:00, and then headed out to the train station to get Elyse. She showed up around 10:40, and we headed to an Acme store in Brigantine so that she could get some dinner for herself. She then wanted to check out the Hard Rock, and I wanted to photograph Resorts at night. Here’s what I got of Resorts at night:
The 2004 building.
The former Chalfonte-Haddon Hall building.
You want to talk about cold, I was chilled to the bone – even when all bundled up. When I was in my twenties, I used to be able to bundle up and photograph for hours in winter temperatures without any issue. Then I lost the weight, and got a bit older. And as a result, I get cold. Next time I photograph Atlantic City at night, I’m doing it in much warmer temperatures.
And then after scooping Elyse up from the Hard Rock (where she got carded twice for looking underage – heh heh), we headed back to the hotel. We hit the casino one last time, where I played with the $24 that I had won the night before. I lost all of it on the roulette wheel, so ultimately, for the trip as a whole, I broke even. I had some fun at the casino, and in the end, it didn’t cost me anything. I could live with that.
One thing that I was surprised about on our second night was how many people who were clearly under the legal gambling age of 21 that I saw at Caesars. For adults, sure – you stay at the hotel and go to the casino and gamble. But why would you bring kids to a casino hotel when the kids can’t participate in most of the activities there? They’re not even allowed to be present on the casino floor just to watch. I don’t understand why you would bring them to a place like Caesars, vs. somewhere that doesn’t have gambling like the Showboat. Go figure.
On Saturday, we got checked out of Caesars and made our way back to the western side of the state. Our first stop was in Camden, at the Michael J. Doyle Fishing Pier. I was planning on taking my drone out for a flight over the Delaware River to photograph the SS United States and the Philadelphia skyline, but after I got all of the equipment set up and powered on and went into the B4UFly app to get my LAANC approval for the area, I saw a bunch of red in the area. Well, crap. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the airspace around Philadelphia was closed for “VIP movement”. In other words, President Biden was probably heading home, and the airspace was shut down all around his route. Good for him, I suppose, but sucks for me, because it meant that I would not be flying that day. This is as far as the drone got:
And from there, back into the box it went. Those are the breaks, I suppose. So that plan gets added to the list for next time.
While we were in the area, we also checked out nearby Phoenix Park as a potential flying location for the same subjects, and that seemed like a reasonable place to go in the future, though the parking there was quite limited.
In any event, with that plan’s having fizzled, we continued on with our plans. Our next stop was the Scrub Daddy facility in Pennsauken. Elyse is a big fan of Scrub Daddy products, and she wanted to see where their headquarters building was since we were nearby.
Elyse poses with the Scrub Daddy sign on the building.
Elyse takes a selfie with the sign.
Elyse photographs the Scrub Daddy building with her phone.
Elyse gets a selfie with the road sign. The taped-over part on the sign is for a retail store that has not yet been completed.
Elyse poses for a photo with the road sign.
All in all, that was a fun stop. I suspect that we’ll be back, especially once that retail store opens. Elyse loves Scrub Daddy, and has a good rapport with their social media people.
From there, we headed over to Cherry Hill Mall. That was another stop for Elyse. I’ve apparently lost my enthusiasm for malls because my first thought was, “Yeah, it’s a mall.” Though we did get one amusing photo:
I describe this as “Elyse listens to the ocean in a set of glasses”, as we were making fun of the “you can hear the ocean in a shell” remarks that people make. I’ve never thought that it sounded particularly like the ocean in a shell, and cups sound exactly the same.
From there, we visited my cousin Mike and his wife Tara, who live nearby. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Uncle Bruce was also over, as it had been a while since I’d seen him. We all had a great time together.
After that, Elyse and I stopped at a nearby Walmart before heading home. This sign amused me:
This is citing Borough of Somerdale ordinance § 247-27.1, which prescribes exactly what the sign says: park in one parking space, and stay in between the lines. The real question is what prompted them to sign that ordinance in the parking lot of Walmart.
In any event, after that, we ran the trip home more or less nonstop, going down 295, over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and through Baltimore, only stopping at Elyse’s parents’ house to pick up that new phone. We had it shipped there because we wouldn’t be home to retrieve it, and didn’t want to play tag with UPS. So all in all, I’d say that we had a good time on our little weekend trip to Atlantic City. We definitely need to do more of this in the future.
Categories: Family, New Jersey, Photography, Travel