Terry Alan in AC!

Okay, this is silly.  We see restaurant reviews all the time, but how about "rest stop" reviews?  While we're not going to travel all over the place to check out rest stops, it does occur to us that one of the first possible places a visitor from the North will experience is the Atlantic City rest area on the Garden State Parkway.

Friday afternoons and evenings, and Saturday mornings, this place is teeming with people on the way to AC, Ocean City and Cape May County resorts to the South.  All sorts of people from all sorts of places. A melting pot.  Perhaps rest areas should be considered sovereign territories, some sort of international free zone.

Well, anyway, the Atlantic City rest stop has changed little since the Parkway was built some 50-years ago.  There's the main fast food restaurant (Burger King) and some smaller businesses.  There's also some rather ugly dead space, once occupied by the gas station office which has since moved away from the main building.  We hereby suggest to the rest stop operator---HMS Host---that they covert that space into an information center like the one in Cape May County.

So, on with our review...  Food Quality: No better or worse than any other Burger King; Prices: Slightly higher than your neighborhood BK; Service: Very friendly employees; Cleanliness: Could be better, but it's tough to keep up with customers in a hurry; Chance of seeing a weirdo among patrons: higher than the average convenience store.

And here's a note on the gas station area: due to a regulation of the Parkway, they may only change their prices weekly.  So during a rising period like now, you can get a bargain until they catch up with your local gas station---they are higher, however, on average.

Now you know.  But we have the feeling that most of you will not base your decision to stop or not on this information, but on the tried and true reasons like you're hungry, thirsty, or have to use the bathroom!  (This is the first and last of a series, even though we could easily check out the Farley Plaza on the Atlantic City Expressway, but we already know it's pretty nice.)