Another Month in Annapolis, so Another Road Trip

Early August 2019

Heather loves a good festival, so when we saw signs for a peach festival we made plans to go. It was a little smaller than we had expected, pretty much an oversized church bake sale, but it was worth going to, and we had to bring home a peach pie to avoid appearing rude.

The next day was the First Sunday Street Fair. To avoid parking we just took an Uber, who dropped us off at the top of main street.

The festival was several blocks long down West Street and pretty good, but it was just so brutally hot it took a lot of the fun out of it.

A few days later we left for our last summer road trip from the boat, to the Boston area this time.

On Monday we finished packing and cleaning the boat, loaded up the car after checking the oil, and headed north. We weren’t really sure how far we would make it the first day. Heading north toward Baltimore was pretty routine at this point, and I was very familiar with the NJ turnpike from when I was doing a two weeks on, two weeks off tour for work out of CT. On the weekend in between I would drive down to Annapolis to take a boat class.

So I was familiar with the NJ turnpike and its rest stops with the, shall we say, unusual clientele, especially at night. But this hot mess below was worth a picture. Yes, that's a pony. No, I don't know why. His little stall sidecar is built up to look like another motorcycle. Okay, that's clever. It's hauling the largest trailer I've seen hauled by a motorcycle, with piles of bags and, just in case, a complete drum set at the back. And a spare bale of hay on the trailer hitch. The finishing touch was a Trump bumpersticker. Truly an HL Mencken moment.

We decided to give NYC a wide berth, mostly for traffic reasons, but also because Heather cries every time we drive through. She thinks it is a very sad place, and for a lot of people, I guess that's true. Well, we had to get across the Hudson at some point, so this time we took the new Tappan Zee bridge. It was put up over the last few years alongside the old bridge, and finally opened in 2017. It still had that new bridge smell.

We kept going north along the Merritt Expressway to the Stratford area, then continued through New Haven. Once we got to the north side of New Haven that was pretty much the extent of my range and we were covering new territory. We kept on for a little longer and made it to one of the Indian casino resorts, the Monegan Sun. I love me those gambling subsidized hotels.

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