Four days on the road with daughter, dog and hand puppet
Day 3: Wednesday, June 28
The yin and yang of coal country
I wouldn't say the road was taking its toll, maybe it was the motel bed. In any case we awoke once again on Day 3 of the trip in strange-yet-sorta-familiar surroundings. Tousled, groggy, in another dog-friendly hotel near a Major American Highway (MAH). This particular edifice was situated in the Lexington, KY, environs. From there we rejoined the road eastward. But first: breakfast.
This could be any one of us in this "just got out of bed" pic. Extra points if you can put a name to the mane.
Gotta say, from stay to stay, as we arced west to northeast like an ever upward line of profit on some CFO's aspirational spreadsheet, the quality of the "free breakfast" served at our roadside inns arced in its own direction, downward, a trajectory that featured corresponding descending flavors, nourishment and aesthetics. And this, The Most Important Meal of the Day™. There is no photographic evidence of breakfasts after our feast of Day 2; suffice it to say things became more industrial and less organic as onward we went. The food, mostly.
After breakfast, we hit the road and continued on our journey through rolling green hills along the top edge of Kentucky.
On the road again. The rolling green hills of Kentucky afore, beside and behind us on a hazy morning.
It wasn't until reviewing this trip I noticed how close we had got to the Ohio River as we pressed on. This was a theme-in-retrospect; ours wasn't a tourist trip, we were on a mission to ARRIVE IN CONNECTICUT, so we missed tons of road-adjacent points of interest. We weren't making any detours; if it wasn't in our line of sight, it wasn't on the itinerary. C'est la guerre.
After the lovely rolling hills of the verdant Kentucky countryside, we passed into West Virginia. In front of us, more rolling hills of green. But as we crossed out of Kentucky, we had to pass a vast, hideous industrial site. You couldn't see it as you approached; it was hidden from sight — unless you were heading west.
A refinery, in all its (un)finery, the poisonous infrastructure wouldn't have looked out of place in Texas, where it would be visible for miles and miles in all directions — a point of Texas pride. This massive man-made horror was hidden behind the hills, and sprawled like a fallen drunk beside the Big Sandy River, as if the entirety of Kentucky's industrial ugliness had been confined to this one desecrated chunk of real estate, and thrust as close to its neighboring state as possible. The thoughtful people of Kentucky had dumped this scar of horrific petro-chemical chaos in a place where only West Virginians could see it.
Catlettsburg Refinery, vast and hideous. The photo doesn't do justice to its vast hideousness. Thanks, Kentucky!
And so on and into the weird and wonderful state of West Virginia.
Hello, West Va!
West Virginia was sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes scarred with some random industrial ugliness of its own that sprouted randomly between the pretty bits. On our route, we encountered mostly the pretty bits.
Pretty hills in West Virginia
More pretty hills in West Virginia
More...you get it...
At some point that morning, we zoomed through Charleston, the capital, a thin strip of a city that snakes along the north bank of the Kanawha River, squeezed between the river and lumpy hills too steep to bear a cohesive municipality. The city is maybe a mile or two wide before the hills get high. If you're an Austinite reading this, imagine Zilker park as the only thing on the south bank of Lady Bird Lake and the city limits demarcated by 15th street with nothing else north of that. Weird. As we peeled off I-64 for I-79, the Capitol and its gold dome could be discerned down-river, so there's that.
The lanky city of Charleston, West Virginia
So it went. Lovely rolling hills, sprouts of ugliness. We focused on the hills, as the photos attest. Then, out of nowhere, appeared what looked like a space station or shiny new NASA outpost. Officially a tech hub, nothing about West Virginia suggested, as we drove along its backwaters and frontwaters, that there could be this sort of 21st century scientific vigor occupying such a vast chunk of real estate in them thar rolling hills. To the elitist traveler from the coastal elitist city of Austin, Texas (not all that far from that science-averse state's own NASA tech hub in the great city of Houston), it looked as if all this tech had been appropriated from somewhere where science is real, perhaps a galaxy far far away....
Give Joe Manchin his due, the gleaming white and steel modernity reeked of pork, no doubt beneficial for the local economy. That man Manchin had brought home the bacon to his state. Well done. Now piss off into the deepest darkest coalmine of forgotten history, Joe. I hear its "Almost Heaven."
Heck, maybe I'm being too hard on jinkin' Joe and it was the other senator from West Va who porked this tech-loin.
Points if you can name him/her, cos I sure as hell can't.
On we drove, crossing into westernmost Maryland somewhere in the mountains.
Welcome out of West Va. ;O)
Not far along was the highest point on our journey. I looked it up for you (fellow) road-n-map nerds: Keysers Ridge, 2,880 feet above sea level. We stopped for gas a few miles later, just past Grantsville, at a pit stop on Chestnut Ridge Road, where we met...an old-timer from Houston who had arrived to fill up in his monster-sized (Texas-sized) pickup truck. A friendly fellow, he noticed our Texas license plates and sauntered over to say hi and ask what brought us up to the ridge.
The gas station, to our non-resident amazement/amusement, doubled as a liquor store and, apparently (discovered when I did the road-n-map nerding) a gun-seller. Suddenly the Blue Laws of the South had given way to the practical needs of society; I don't know exactly the hours when it is permitted to buy booze in the mountains of rural Maryland, but if you want your hooch, and a telescopic sight for your hunting rifle, head to this here filling station.
The Cumberland Ridge liquor store. Filling station. Liquor store. Filling station. Duck season, fire!
P.S. That is not the Houstonion's truck; his was a big black behemoth F-350 with leather interior and room for a field of wheat in the bed.
The gal behind the counter was friendly as all get-out, I was her "darling," at least while I paid. Maybe that's why the ex-Houstonian was up here, for some old-timey, friendly chit-chat with a friendly filling station/liquor store/gun store clerkette. And for a million gallons of gas for his monster truck.
Kait walked Alaska while I filled up Ronda the Honda. Man, it was cold up there! We climbed aboard, and off we went down The Old National Road, down literally and geographically; this was the start of the l-o-n-g and often steep descent toward the coast.
As noted above, among the things we drove blithely past in blissful ignorance along this narrow corridor of west Maryland: to the south, the Potomac, and to the north, the Mason-Dixon Line. We slinked between both on the thinnest of state panhandles, unaware of how close these sights were. Sure was a pretty part of the country, though.
Near Friendsville, MD
Near Accident, MD (no pun intended, well not initially...).
When I captioned the photo above, I thought to myself, "Did we pass some highway carnage in Maryland that I've blurred from my memory?" It's been a hell of a year, and my memory of events between, say January 1, 2023, and, well, now, isn't all that reliable. The answer to the question just posed, though: Nope. "Accident" is just the name of the town.
From here, our eastward journey shifted north-north-east as we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line out of the South between Hagerstown, MD and the prosaicly monikered State Line, PA. The sign encourages new arrivals to PA to "Pursue Your Happiness" — a fortune cookie admonition if ever there was one. I suppose that's exactly what we were doing, on this our road-trip adventure.
Come on get happy...y'all are in the North now.
Pennsylvania undulated in its own low-key(stone state) way, more farmland than the pastures of Kentucky and coal-bump mountains of West Virginia. Didn't see any obvious taxpayer contributions to local boondoggles, either.
Pennsylvania Pharmland
With most of the best bits of the journey, the stunning and/or dramatic countryside, behind us, we rolled into our hotel just outside of Allentown. There, we detoxed (retoxed?) with a local happy hour brewery beverage while Alaska made friends with the adjacent group sharing our patio. Fresh from some work junket, they had commandeered the barbecue and were roasting up a ton of meat on the grill, none of which we let our hound sample, though they did ask if they could toss something her way.
Kait chills, meat grills, Alaska prepares for any scraps that might come her way.
Day 4: Thursday, June 29
Wayward in Westchester
We woke to the well-worn sights of a morning in another roadside motel.
Yup, this could be any one of us after a night's sleep in another anonymous roadside motel...
After a breakfast that continued the previously noted downward trend of aesthetics, nourishment and edibility, we hit the road. Like modern day Washington astride his narrow canoe, we soon encountered, then crossed the Delaware River. Unlike the preternaturally well-balanced cherry tree ax-murderer in his boat, we were heading in the other direction. Into New Jersey. On Interstate 78. Things were about to get vaguely, then definitely, familiar. And then completely unfamiliar all over again.
The first of the last three welcome signs...Hello, New Jersey!
We still had some hills to descend as we made our way through the verdant western part of the Garden State.
Yahweh! It's Mahway!
Central New Jersey's main artery is the Turnpike, and I have many many many many memories of driving up and down that road, but Kait, Alaska, Cookie Monster and I stuck to an interior route, missing out on the lovely cities of Newark and East Rutherford and the swampland between 'em. There are nicer bits of the 'pike farther north where my grandparents used to live up in Bergen County — Englewood, to be specific. In a colonial style house not too dissimilar from the one we were heading toward in Connecticut.
But we were in a hurry and crossed into New York, skirting New York City as we continued up the IH-287, now the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Guess Dewey won something after all...wonder if there are any roads named after Harry S. Truman in the Empire State...
Gov'nor Dewey welcomes you to NY
At this point, things were definitely getting more familiar as we headed up IH-287 toward the Tappan Zee bridge, now the "Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge." Evidently, if you become governor of New York, you get some extensive length of tarmac named after you. The bridge is not as I remember it; now its suspended in the modern architecture- and, presumably, engineering-style. Felt sturdy enough...
Engineered in the modern style and rather impressive.
Once upon the eastern shore of the Hudson, things got unexpectedly tricky. We figured we were a couple hours from Glastonbury, but due to accidents on one of the two interstate highways that leads out of New York, we opted to swap our planned coastal route (IH-95, for you road-n-map nerds keeping score) for the inland one (IH-684 to IH-84, for you road-n-map nerds keeping score). Sadly, upon arriving at the ramp to the 84s, we discovered that this road was also jam-packed with the accident-prone. Our goal of avoiding hours-long traffic jams ended up with us spending all those hours on winding country lanes as we navigated our way out of Westchester County. Or tried to navigate. For some reason, it felt that we were zig-zagging up and down the edge of New York state, Connecticut tantalizingly just a country-lane away, but without any means of crossing the state line.
Westchester, pretty, and practically inescapable.
Not quite Lost in Yonkers, we spent what seemed like hours trying to Escape from New York. Sure was a pretty drive, though. Of course, all the up and down and back and forth meant an unanticipated pit stop. Here is Kait having tripped over the curb while taking Alaska for a bathroom break.
Kait on her keister in Westchester
Finally, we found our way into Connecticut and headed in a Hartford-ly direction. Glastonbury is just south and east of the capital, on the other side of the Connecticut River. When I lived in the Boston burbs, this was a familiar drive, through and around Hartford on the wee roads with hairpin entrance and exit ramps.
Hidden behind all that greenery was the "Welcome to Connecticut" road sign...
practical and unassuming, pretty much like everything else in the Nutmeg State.
That's about all there is to say about the trip. We got to the house in the mid-afternoon and settled down on the back deck in the sunshine for a well-deserved rest in excellent company!
Post-script
New experiences abound for the hound. For Alaska, a flight of stairs posed a new challenge in getting to and fro. Well, up and down; she's figured it out now. Mostly.
Surveying the new route down from the top of the stairwell.
For y'all who haven't seen the house, it's a "European" Colonial. European because its exterior is stucco. It was built in 1929. Come on up for a visit sometime.
Casa Polgar del Norte
And finally...Our fellow traveler on his new perch in the studio.
