Down to Long Island

This was our last-day-upstate family portrait. Mark and Mary went home unexpectedly early, and I forgot to get the picture before they took off. Curses! On the far left, you can see the path below the hill that leads to the dock, and lake.

On day eight of the trip we headed south, typically of us without directions or maps (except of the Google variety, courtesy of my phone). The phone led us to the thruway and due south. Easy enough. We stopped once near Coxsackie, for lunch. The girls were in great spirits. The weather was great.

As we got closer to the Tappan Zee Bridge, our phone told us to take a smaller highway east, rather than continue on the big highway south to the bridge. I thought it might have a better way to get to the bridge. Barb thought it would be an adventure. There wasn't much time to decide, so we trusted in the Google and went east.

Into New Jersey.

It was kind of cool at first, just seeing someplace new. At one point we went through Ho-Ho-Kus (yep, that's really the name of a town in Jersey), which thrilled Barb no end because we had with us a book set in Ho-Ho-Kus. At one point we saw the skyline of Manhattan through a blue haze, miles and miles away yet, but framed perfectly by a gap in the hills that our road went through.

That skyline gave me pause. Why am I seeing Manhattan as we head east?

"Barb," I said, "are we heading toward the George Washington Bridge?"

"I think so."

We were. And we hit it at 4:00pm. On a Saturday, but who cares? Not the city that never sleeps -- or takes a weekend. It was hellacious, delaying us by at least two hours. We made an adventure out of it, marveling at the crumbling infrastructure of the Bronx, the enormous number of motor vehicles, the huge apartment towers standing shoulder to shoulder, full of people, New Yorkers.

The girls were troupers, first-order adventurers. They were butt-sore and restless, but never cried, never complained, after eight hours in the little rental Nissan Versa. And once we got off the Cross-Bronx, the Long Island Expressway was clear and smooth, and I put the pedal to the metal.

This is our proof. It may not look so bad on the GW, but it was bad. The worst part (the 14 toll booths that funnel down to four lanes) was behind us, but here we were moving start and stop, averaging maybe ten miles per hour.