Sunday, May 21
OK, this was going to be a tough driving day. Had a surprisingly good sleep, not small or weird beds and not loud AC. Took a quick shower, got some nutrition and calories in their small breakfast room, we packed up like pros, and then hit the road pretty early.
The first highlight (and maybe the best of the day) was immediate as we crossed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The day had “dawned” under a severe overcast, mixed with smoke from Canadian wildfires, and our trek over the bridge out into the ocean was set in a low, streaky sky. This was where the Battle of Yorktown was really won … the French navy kept the English navy from entering Chesapeake Bay in this huge strait.
We could see out into the Atlantic itself, and on our left into the Bay, but not more than a few miles in each direction. Container ships moved faster than I would have thought possible out to sea through the Thimble Shoal Channel and into the Bay via the Chesapeake Channel, as we motored along at the speed limit across the bridge and down through the tunnels in the middle of the water, 18 miles over to Fisher’s Island and then onto the Delmarva Peninsula.
We traveled on and on, North on the Delmarva Peninsula and finally out of Virginia into Maryland, and then at long last into Delaware (our 12th state). This was miles and miles of rural driving like we’d seen all through the South, with billboards every few hundred yards for personal injury lawyers and with dollar stores to the left and right. But this was straighter, there were no curves in the road.
How to describe the rest of the day? The traffic slowly picked up and picked up as we got into Delaware, and the far-between stoplights on the highway got more and more frequent. By the time we got up to Dover DE, the rural highway was getting close to the “character” of route 1 in Saugus. But it mercifully morphed into a superhighway (strangely called “route 1”) and we were soon in a pack of cars doing 80. We stopped at a rest area, but the only exit from that sent us in the wrong direction!?! I was not impressed with Delaware.
Finally made it to the North end of the state, and then over the bridge to the New Jersey Turnpike. Trying to keep this short, but the NJ Turnpike was as forbidding as ever. It split into the “car” and “truck” parts, and many cars went on the truck part since it was Sunday, relieving congestion some. We never really jammed up in New Jersey, but we could feel the New York gravity well dragging us inexorably forward into its maw.
A number of highway rest areas were closed for renovation(?), and we targeted the Woodrow Wilson rest area for a needed pee and lunch break. Unfortunately, everyone else felt that same way. The parking lot was more than a madhouse, I can’t believe we lucked into a space, and when I got inside there was a line for the men’s room stretching around the lobby. The woman’s room line was twice as long.
Ack! We had hoped to find a quiet picnic table or something to eat lunch there, but no chance. It was a maelstrom of angry people and honking cars. I made it back into the searing sun in the crazed parking lot, and luckily Sarah was jumping up and down with an alternative. We screwed out of there immediately (SUVs faced off over who would get our vacated spot), headed up the highway for a few miles, exited, and then followed suburban roads to the Etra Lake State Park, a wonderful oasis for us in the middle of New Jersey.
There was a cluster of people around their skate park and a few scattered groups using their vast network of soccer fields, but there was no one else at their picnic tables, where we had our last, leisurely PB&J lunch (we were now out of bread!). The lake was blue and peaceful, though small, and they actually had real rest rooms. This was a great interlude in the long day of driving, and was another small, hidden gem.
OK, it was time for some serious driving, like we hadn’t been doing any before! The rest of NJ featured thicker and thicker traffic. We’d experienced New York on a Tuesday going South, and it was packed. Maybe going North on a mid-afternoon Sunday would be better? Not a chance, we were in a 5MPH traffic jam starting at the Goethals Bridge onto Staten Island, continuing over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge over the straits of New York Bay into Brooklyn, and it didn’t thin out until far, far East on Long Island.
This was a problem, but was not totally unexpected, and the good part of it was that we had plenty of time to look around and see the spectacular urban/natural landscape over the ocean entrance to New York and Jersey City. Manhattan dominated the view to the North, and piers and huge ships were underneath us. We finally got off the bridge onto the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, and the traffic there was even worse.
We pulled over at a “rest stop” in Brooklyn where we got a miraculous parking spot. This was Plumb Beach in the Gateway National Recreation Area. We only stopped there for a bit, and our impressions were that a) they had the grossest port-a-potties I’ve ever seen and b) people were really enjoying themselves there. It had turned into a hazy (wildfires probably), warm Spring afternoon with a strong Easterly wind and thoroughly wrapped South Asian families were rolling in the sun on the sand.
Back into the slow-moving traffic and it went on and on as we crawled through miles out East on Long Island, wondering if it would ever end. At some point we were close to another classic GD venue, the Nassau Coliseum, but we were surrounded by cars who all wanted to go fast. There wasn’t much open space to be found, but a few NY cowboys in sports cars and motorcycles tried to make some, roaring up the littered breakdown lanes and cutting in and out.
We had gotten off early that morning, but it was already late afternoon before the traffic started easing and we could get up to a decent speed. There were still many miles to go, up to the Long Island Expressway itself and then way, way out to the Eastern parts of the island. At long last we got to the Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Riverhead NY, where we got a nice first floor room.
We weren’t about to get adventurous for dinner after that long day, and just walked across the parking lot to Buffalo Wild Wings. For a sports fan, they were very well-appointed. They featured an array of flags from local professional and college teams, an evocative picture of Mike Bossy holding the Cup at some point in the Islanders’ early-80’s dynasty, and the classic picture of Walt Frazier winning the NBA championship with a jump shot over Jerry West in the early 70s.
They also had a good beer list and I had a Blue Point Hoptical Illusion from an LI brewery. I could see 17 TVs! Nice dinner, back to the hotel, and we actually got in a last Parks game before bed. We’d traveled 437.6 tough miles that day.
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