Ah Day 5. The final day. By the time we were leaving Columbus, I was starting to get punchy from being in the car. I knew the destination was close, but by the time we hit Pennsylvania (which was very beautiful, by the way) I was ready to be out of the car.
We got an early start, leaving Columbus around 7:30am. Naturally, at that time of the morning, I was still trying to wake up, and was diligently blogging away on my phone. I always tried to get the blog done in the morning, when Dave would be driving the first leg, so that I could have it knocked out by the time it was my turn to drive. It made for a good system, and since most days we were leaving from cities where the roads were more confusing, it was best for him to drive since I get nervous when people are zig-zagging around between lanes.
We exited Ohio quickly and headed into Pennsylvania, which was the other state (aside from Oklahoma) where we spent the most time driving through. We stopped off for gas in Bellefonte, PA but since we had fruit and granola bars in the car, we opted out of a lunch stop, in favor of getting to our final destination faster. Even though I drove through a good portion of Pennsylvania, Dave had warned me about PA State Troopers and how they were, er, less than sensitive to drivers with out-of-state plates, so I spent a good portion of the ride abiding by all PA speed limits within 1mph. Unfortunately, the speed limit was not the 75 of which we were accustomed and, to add insult to injury, we didn’t see a single PA State Trooper. Sigh.
Conversely, we hit New Jersey around 4pm, and immediately awaiting drivers right across the state line were two of New Jersey’s finest. Just laying in wait. New Jersey was the state in which we saw the most police (we determined that troopers in other states just didn’t want to police the areas which were surely “the sticks” of the state) and we hit the NJ state line right in time for rush hour traffic. Luckily we were going the opposite direction and we cruised through, relatively-speaking.
It was about an 2 hours from Northport and this was also the time in the trip when I starting flailing my arms, proclaiming we were never going to get there…not unlike a four-year-old. This made Dave laugh because we literally almost there, but it certainly didn’t feel like it to me. All I knew was that we’d spent five days in the car, whereas Dave viewed it as us only having 2 hours to go (he’s definitely a glass half-full kinda guy.)
We also had to go through the George Washington Bridge and we had been alerted to lane closures due to repair work and knew that was probably going to be rough. While I had been driving through PA, Dave did a little google detective work to see about bridge tolls, prior to this knowledge. Then it was a trifecta of travel awful: the bridge lane closure, we were sure to hit it around rush hour and the toll was 12 AMERICAN DOLLARS! AND, as if that wasn’t enough, we also had to cross the Throg’s Neck Bridge (not Frog’s Neck, in case you were wondering. Oops.) and Throg’s Neck makes travelers pay $6.50 EACH WAY! Golden Gate, you are missing out on some serious income.
We battled on and surprisingly, made it through the GW unscathed (though slightly poorer). Then we crossed into NY and I saw the NY skyline and that was even worse for me because I knew how close we were to completing the journey yet being in traffic was just cruel. Although, all things considered, the traffic wasn’t as horrendous as it could have been and it wasn’t until the Long Island Expressway that we slowed below 30 mph for a while.
We finally pulled in to Dave’s parents’ house around 6:30pm and Dave’s mom took an “after shot” to go with my mom’s “before shot” taken when we left CA.
3330 miles later we made it. In five days. Weird.
Now that I’m back with computer access, I will post the visual tour later but now, Dave and I have plans to go walk on the beach because a) we can; b) we need to be mobile after being cooped up; and c) the weather is perfect with a nice breeze and we want to take advantage of it.