13 States - To Gettysburg

Tuesday, May 9

We spent a good amount of time thinking about what to bring on our trip down the Appalachians and back up the coast, and possibly over-packed.  Mid-Spring can bring changing weather, and we didn’t want to find ourselves without enough light clothes for hot days or heavy clothes for cold/rainy days.  We needed the right footwear for mountain trails and also for the shore, and we needed good trail packs with mosquito/sunscreen/first aid stuff/ropes/knives/whistles/etc.  We also needed to have enough food in the cooler for lunches in the middle of nowhere and for evenings when we couldn’t find restaurants.  And we didn’t want to be lugging big suitcases and a heavy cooler in and out of hotels, so needed to split it all strategically between multiple duffel bags and insulated bags.

We got everything packed and in the car … the only thing I forgot was my yoga pad!  Kona and Hilo were sure our organizations were all about a big trip up to Maine and so did their thing of trying to hide when we were ready to leave.  But we found them and kissed them goodbye and headed out for the highway by a little after 9:00AM on a sunny Spring Tuesday.

And we immediately found ourselves in a traffic jam!  There’d been an accident on route 128 just South of the Mass Pike and we crawled through the back-up in Waltham and Weston until we could break free.  But we had no set schedule, only a rough itinerary, and so were just amused rather than really upset.

Our first destination was Gettysburg PA.  The Google map lady tried to scare us away from going through Manhattan, but I wanted to re-travel the roads I’d driven many times when I was younger and she had to admit that the alternative route she was suggesting (the Tappan Zee Bridge to the Garden State) was not a pretty picture itself.  Here we were traveling in mid-day on a Tuesday when school was still in session and the traffic was a clusterfuck!  Oh well, that’s what we’d signed up for and that’s what we got.

Turned off the Turnpike in Sturbridge and shifted to the Parkways down through Connecticut and New York, South of the Charter Oak Bridge.  We followed these all the way to the expressways leading us over the Harlem River and to the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson to New Jersey.  By then we were barely inching forwards, not even crawling, and when things opened up a bit as we headed South through New Jersey we were kept jumping by outrageously dangerous drivers weaving in and out of the thick traffic.

Finally turned off in Newark and headed West on Interstate 78, but this featured more of the same.  We stopped for gas before leaving New Jersey (Sarah opined that it was the dirtiest bathroom she’d ever seen) and the traffic eventually thinned out a bit as we entered Pennsylvania, but there were an incredible number of trucks sharing the road with us.  Honestly, 75% of the traffic was trucks by then and it was a bizarre experience … were there really that many trucks in the world?  I guess we need to get out more.

The Google traffic lady spoke up as we approached Harrisburg, warning us of a traffic jam ahead.  After the road experiences we’d had already we were ready to believe her and followed her directions for a circuitous route to 83 South and then to 76 West over the Susquehanna.  Though we griped about this dictator, there were a good number of times when the Google lady prompted us to avoid traffic jams, and though she could be confusing when re-calculating, we grew to depend on her.  I can’t recall what shortcuts we took a lot of the time … at one point she had us whipping down small back roads in farm country in the middle of North Carolina in order to avoid a long, long, construction backup on Interstate 95 that we could catch glimpses of as we zipped around it.

We finally were on route 15 South to Gettysburg and could barely get a few calming breaths in before she sent us another detour into town.  But Gettysburg is such a nice, charming little city when you get there.  We parked in a municipal garage behind the genteel Gettysburg Hotel ($12 for 24 hours) and checked into a nice second floor room that had no microwave or refrigerator.  After some clumsy unpacking (we knew that in a few days we’d be pros at this) and a little decompression we headed out on the street, seeking dinner.

Sarah had done some research and actually found a cider bar.  Sarah loves cider, it was a beautiful early evening, and we stopped for a drink (Yellow Birch NEIPA for me and Arkansas Black Cider for Sarah) at a table on the sidewalk outside the Ploughman Taproom in Lincoln Square, where a couple of buskers were playing guitars.  Then a few blocks down to Garryowen Irish Pub, named after the old traditional marching and drinking song.  Most of the other patrons there were groups of guys, and we realized they were all around us, men making a pilgrimage to a military park.  I had a Green Grunge IPA and Country Chicken Salad.

Soon back to the hotel and an early bedtime.  We’d traveled 431.6 miles from Woburn.