In the summer of 2014, we planned a short trip to visit my mother, sister and other family in Vermont, and then turn westwards across New York State. Melissa had a three-day business conference just outside of Rochester, and we planned to see Niagara Falls afterwards. We sketched out about 10 days for the trip, more or less.
We planned on two days journey up to Vermont, then a day or so there, and then west. Melissa’s conference was a Wednesday/Thursday/Friday affair, so we had to be in Rochester by Tuesday night. The nearest campground seemed to be about 15 miles out of town, in a little Finger Lake burg called Canandaigua. We would spend the three days there, then go on west to Buffalo to see the Falls, spend a day or two there, and then head south along Lake Erie, down in to Pennsylvania, and eastwards back toward home in New Jersey. I’d never seen Niagara or the northwestern part of Pennsylvania.
Driving an RV in the eastern megalopolis is quite a different beast than tooling around out west, so devising a plan for the first day’s journey up to the mid-Hudson Valley would be a challenge. I’d made the trip up along the New Jersey turnpike to New York City often enough that I didn’t want to mess around with that route. We decided to try to bypass much of the congestion and horrible roadway by starting out north in to Pennsylvania, and then following smaller state and local roads – Route 202 across the Delaware at New Hope, and then Route 206 to Interstate 287, looping well away from New York City proper, and heading north along the banks of the Hudson, crossing at the rickety old Tappan Zee bridge, and then following Route 9 north until we crossed over into Vermont. If we could make it to Sleepy Hollow on the first day, we’d be good….