From Mount Mitchell you can see Sandy Hook, which is part of the Gateway National Recreation area. They have a lot of beaches (including the biggest nude beach along the Atlantic!!) but because I was pressed for time I went to the end of the island to see Fort Hancock and the Sandy Hook lighthouse. I’ve been to many forts but I think Fort Hancock is the biggest and most intact I’ve ever seen. What’s really cool is that Officer’s Row faces the ocean so it’s quite a scenic spot. 
Many of the buildings are now condemned but it is quite the sprawling compound. They had an old mortar battery that went back into the woods. I love the idea of these "disappearing guns".
Amidst the fort is the oldest working lighthouse in the U.S! It was designed and built in 1764. At that time, it stood only 500 feet from the tip of Sandy Hook; however, today, due to growth caused by littoral drift, it is almost one and a half miles inland from the tip.
This is the Visitor Center for Gateway: 
Continuing on down the Garden State Parkway, my next stop was Double Trouble state park.
It is in the Pinelands National Reserve. The Pinelands is classified as a United States Biosphere Reserve and in 1978 was established by Congress as the country’s first National Reserve. It includes portions of seven southern New Jersey counties, and encompasses over one-million acres of farms, forests and wetlands.
Double Trouble has a historic village that revolved around cranberry farming. There are still active cranberry bogs to this day and you can observe the harvest in the fall. It was a really nice spot. I guess I never thought of New Jersey as a place for cranberry farming. 
My last stop of the day was the Barnegat Lighthouse. It took awhile to get there because it’s on a barrier island and you have to drive on the one road that’s full of tourists running all over the crosswalks so you can never drive over 20mph. I will never understand how people think going to a beach town is relaxing. Anyway I finally made it out to the light. It was a really nice lighthouse. There’s also a jetty/pier thing that you can walk along and enjoy the vista. 
One of the last remnants of maritime forest on Long Beach Island is found at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park and there’s a short trail through it. 
It was really cool to be on sand and then all of a sudden be in the middle of a forest. It was a nice way to end the day.
But alas the day was not over. I had planned on camping and didn’t make reservations because a two night minimum is required and I was only passing through. After calling a few state forests I quickly realized that I would not be camping this evening so I figured I’d just grab a hotel. After calling around I decided my best bet was Atlantic City because it’s full of hotels. Those that weren’t sold out had extremely high rates ($230 for a Howard Johnson!!) and the motels in my price range looked like something you would see on Cops. After driving around and calling hotels and getting extremely frustrated I ended up at the Taffy Motel. Suffice to say it had a bed and a shower so I made do but was out the door by 7:00am the next day.
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