Road Trip! Day One

This past weekend Jeff flew to from Eastern PA to Boston with the sole purpose of sharing my drive to Charlotte.  It was a really fun trip!  Here are the total stats:


Food:  $44.24
Hotel: $95.23
Gas:    $65.95
Miles:  ~900
Number of States:  10 (9 in one day!)
Overall MPG:  36.63

Did I mention my 2001 Honda Civic kicks ass?  More details after the JUMP.



DAY ONE

The map above shows our day 1 progress.  We started off doing really well.  Got coffee, Jeff packed the car in the morning while I recovered from packing with my family the day before, and we left around 9:30am.  Coffee was definitely first on the agenda, and after properly caffeinating my cold and donating to the state education fund (scratch ticket), we were on our way. The first snafu occurred when we got to New York, and 95 took an unexpected right turn.  We didn't realize we were off course until we started going over bridges I didn't recognize, and suddenly our friendly GPS was "recalculating".  We'd hit 295.  Our path is shown below:

As you can see, our correction took us straight through lower Manhattan.  It wasn't terrible, it was just slow.

After a while I realized I had an opportunity... So I threw on my shoes and at the next red light, I committed my first "Chinese Tourism Drill" on Canal Street.  Many apologies to the cyclist I nearly killed with my passenger door.

We finally managed to get through to the Holland Tunnel!  We entered the NJ Turnpike a few minutes later.  We didn't realize it at the time, but this fortunate accident ended up earning Jeff the title of "most states traveled in one day".  A competition he holds with his friend James, who blamed New England for having "stupidly small" colonies.

And speaking of the colonies, Jeff brought along a bit of fun from his family road tripping days.  Whenever his family crossed a state line, Mom would pull out a small trinket for the kids along the way.  This was New Jersey, I believe:

Snap bracelets are back, baby!

As we approached Pennsylvania, Jeff noticed a Cabela's at a rest stop near the borders.  "You gotta see it," he insisted.  I was getting pretty tired at this point, solidly into my first real cold of the season, but took his word for it.  Boy was he RIGHT.  First, the storefront:

Cabela's is a hunters/outdoorsman store.  They have a LOT of taxidermy animals.  Below, I admire the trout while Jeff finds the elephant in the room.

They also have guns, gun gear, toy guns, gun shooting games, and things you can eat that were probably shot with guns.  One picture I didn't get was of the 1950's "pop-guns" they show in looney tunes cartoons.  I'd never seen one, and I was horrified!  Parents were getting "shot" by rubber stoppers on strings!  Jeff laughed at my reaction, but wow.  They start 'em young.  There are lots of guns geared towards girls- pink guns as well as "Hunter Dan" and "Hunter Ann" dolls.  They even had stuffed animal heads for your kid's bedroom.

On our way out was a beautiful sunset.  Then back on the road to find dinner and the hotel.

For more pictures from our trip, including more taxidermy and landscapes, click HERE.