On The Road, Again

Kate and I are out in the world again, and it hasn't improved much. We left the farm this morning and headed east toward West Virginia. The highway, especially after we entered West Virginia, was terrible. It was just bump, bump, bump....not fun at all. Additionally, while I recognize that I am becoming a designated old duffer...No, change that to "I understand I've become a designated old duffer,". . . but the way traffic seems to have changed concerns me.....we were traveling at 70+ MPH, and that wasn't nearly enough for many, many people. I spent a lot of time, and I mean a LOT! moving out of the left lane over into the right one. It was tiresome. We managed to avoid incidents and made it to Morgantown, WV.

Other than dodging trucks and over-confident drivers, it was a boring trip, although we have now traversed the "Hardwood Alliance Zone"......that's real...we saw the sign on I-79. Check it out here:Hardwood.
I acknowledge it ain't much, but it's all I got tonight. Stay tuned.

After a peaceful night in Morgantown, we pushed east and north to Allentown, PA. The drive was beautiful. Anyone who hasn't traveled along I-68 and I-71 through northern West Virginia and western Maryland on a beautiful day has missed some of the most beautiful country in the county....if that makes sense.

After we left West Virginia and moved west into Pennsylvania, the driving situation quickly became worse. The quality of the road and the drivers on the road both deteriorated rapidly. We spent the night near Allentown, and decided to treat ourselves to a nicer breakfast than the motel-provided one, mostly because we slept too late to catch breakfast there. As we attempted to find our way to a Cracker Barrel, I made a wrong turn and we found ourselves back on a limited access highway. We drove four or five miles to the next exit, only to learn it was under repair (as are most of the highways in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, we've learned on this trip) and we had to drive another five miles before we could turn around. By the time we found a place to eat breakfast (a fun diner) we'd driven 20 miles and had nothing to show for it.


Breakfast was fun, and good, and we finally got on the road about 11:30. Not a great start. Most of the rest of the day was heavy traffic over bad roads, and many of the other drivers on the road seemed to think they were immortal . . . or they had a death wish...I'm not sure which. However, the last portion of the day's driving was rather pleasant, driving along scenic routes through travel poster-like small villages, almost every thing we saw being neat and tidy. Kate says that's because the folks that live in the villages think they have to keep up the region's reputation. I think it's because the winters are very cold.

We were doing that back road stuff through Connecticut, when in the small town of Brooklyn, we ran across a stop-traffic big statute. We were all of the traffic at that time, but we did stop. Here's the statute. You can learn more about the general at General Putnam.



This is an interesting article on the general, too. Statue