23 July 2010

The bad news? Commuter traffic through Baltimore / Washington DC. The good news? We're not going to work.

Eventually we cleared all that and zipped through the tip of Delaware (no National Parks in Delaware) and the outskirts of Philadelphia, up to Allentown and over to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, which is in New Jersey. I pulled up to where my magic Google Earth map said the stamp was, but it was a restroom. After staring through the trees a bit I spotted another structure down at the other end of the parking lot--sure enough, they'd built a new visitor center. We hoofed it over, got our stamp, and took a couple of pictures just as it started to spit a little rain.



One gps said turn back the way we'd come, the new one said to go straight out this one-lane, 15 mph park road. How long could it be? In the event, about 40 miles--it wasn't always 15, but the speed limits were low, as was the quality of the road. And every time I hoped the next turning point would be on to a major road, I was disappointed. It pretty much followed the Delaware river all the way through the gap, until it hooked up to I-84. (The other route was pretty much due east to I-287/87, then north on that--perhaps the one we took was a minute or so shorter, but without riding them both, ??)

We were heading for what purported to be a stamp in Connecticut, the Upper Housatonic Valley National Historic Area. But what was there was a resort of some sort, the second strike in as many days; nobody at the reception area knew anything about any National Anything, although there was some speculation about a trail. Nothing for it but to motor on.

It was already late enough to give up on the final proposed stop, the Springfield Armory; by the time we'd get there they'd most likely be closed. So I punched "Lodging" into the GPS, and it took us to a Super 8 in Lee, MA. $160+ for the night! "It's a weekend in the summer" she said. "What the traffic will bear" we opined. She said Springfield would probably be even more, and they might not have rooms anyway. It was moot, we weren't going to get back on the road anyway--we were wet (although it had stopped raining) and tired (although not as whipped as the heat does us). A half mile walk for groceries, and we were good.

Some post-mortem on the two stamp anomalies: a closer reading of today's indicated that the stamp was personally held by some manager (and they gave his name), so had we asked for him, we may have been successful; yesterday's was a similar story--they told exactly where it was, and had we had that information we might not have been disappointed. I'll have to pay better attention to the weird ones.

States: Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts

next
home