September, 2018 – we planned a trip up to Vermont to see my mother and other relatives who’ve now moved there from Florida permanently. (Yeah. They lived in Florida, and decided to retire to Vermont. Go figger…)
We hoped to get some good leaf foliage shots but as we left late in September, the family said that the season hadn’t really started yet. We headed up along the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Northeast Extension towards Scranton, where we’d take a right turn, head across the very top of New Jersey and then across the Hudson, into Connecticut and then north again in Hartford towards Vermont. We were headed up towards the middle or so of the state, near White River Junction and east of Hanover, NH.
We arranged for a pet sitter to come and feed the dogs a couple of times a day and let them out to play, and left one rainy morning. It rained all the way there. About two hours in, we stopped at the turnpike rest area near Allentown. It was raining.
It rained on I-84 as we headed east towards Port Jervis and the fabled, but drizzly, Delaware Water Gap.
It rained as we crossed the Hudson and headed into Connecticut.
It was pouring as we stopped for lunch, in Newtown, Connecticut, where the horrible killing of those poor young school kids happened a few years ago.
And it was pouring as we came through Hartford. Our GPS talked to us about exiting I-84 well before it looked like it would have been prudent to do so from the map, so I ignored the cautiously feminine voice. Turns out that the GPS knew what she was talking about. A few miles farther on, we saw a roadside warning sign. “Traffic Accident on NB I-84 9 miles ahead. 7-mile backup.” I did the quick math. We had two miles to get off this road. I dove down the next off-ramp and feverishly reprogrammed the GPS. After several miles of this ‘n’ that, turns, and routes down and around some of the outer ring of Hartford, we found Interstate 91 and hopped on, headed for Massachusetts and parts north.
Turns out there was nothing to distinguish the rest of Connecticut and Massachusetts either, and the first interesting piece of real estate we were aware of was the Vermont Welcome Center that we’d been told was quite a sight. Damn if it wasn’t.
Vermont’s Welcome Center is more impressive than New Jersey’s capitol building. Or, actually, pretty much anything in New Jersey. Down near our Port of Entry where you come across the river from Delaware to New Jersey, on Interstate 95 which of course runs all the way down the east coast of America from Maine to Key West, the New Jersey welcome center/rest stop that travelers find just over the border, has a parking lot, 7 Porta-Potties and three vending machines, and it’s closed on weekends.
By the time we left the Welcome Center (where, I’ll admit, they weren’t exactly bargain basement prices – I paid $7.00 for a bottle of Starbucks Frappuchino…) it was almost dark, so we made the rest of the trip in what some authors might call ‘the gathering gloom’. But we found Mom’s place around 7 pm or so, and got settled in for the night. It was still raining. That made over 10 hours of constant drizzle since we’d left home at about 9 am.
Day 2 – Wednesday, we visit the Quechee Gulch and White River Junction.