On the road to see the daughter

On the road to see the daughter, there were moments. As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I decided to drive to Dulles Airport to pick up our daughter, who had been away at the University of Cape Town for 4.5 months for her semester abroad.

She was initially supposed to fly back to Newark on June 16th, but that made us uncomfortable. Instead, she flew back to Dulles on June 17th. To make this trip, my wife took time off from work and made reservations at a timeshare her mother owns in the Poconos of Pennsylvania for four nights, as well as at a Hampton Inn near the airport in Virginia. BTW, Dulles, which I’ve never been to, is at least 40 minutes away from the nation’s capital.

Monday, June 16

My wife started driving down the New York State Thruway, I-87. We passed Exit 20 (Saugerties) in the right lane. Suddenly, a small car started passing us on the shoulder. It was terrifying because, among other things, it was deafening like a lawnmower.

My theory is that it had decided to take exit 20 and then realized at the very last minute that it was the wrong exit. Why it didn’t just fall in behind us, then merge onto the road is beyond my comprehension. (Other weird driver behaviors on this trip were too tricky to explain.)

For lunch, we stopped at a Perkins Pancake House, which I have an odd affection for. When we were in high school, my sister Leslie was a hostess at the location on Main Street in Binghamton, NY. Sometimes, my not-so-friends and I would come in for a late-night meal.

This Perkins in Pennsylvania also included, in the adjacent building, a standard Thruway snack shop. Next to that was a gas station. A bus of tourists going to Las Vegas stopped in.

While waiting for our food order, a couple of folks at a nearby booth were discussing the musical concerts they would be attending with their kids. One said they were going to see Kendrick Lamar; I wasn’t expecting that, which reveals my own biases. The other person asked who that was; I thought the first would say the guy from the last Super Bowl, but merely said, “a rapper.”

Everything’s legal in New Jersey

We traveled through the small town of Milford, PA. It looked charming, like a small city in New England, such as Stockbridge, MA. (We stopped on the return trip; it even has a castle!)

I was navigating via the mapping device on my wife’s phone. On PA 209, I couldn’t tell quite where to go, so I directed her left, across the Delaware River into New Jersey. She wondered if she should turn around. I said, “Nah.” We could take Route 206 – or was it 209? – and eventually cross a bridge back into Pennsylvania. However, we ended up crossing what I believe was Dingman’s Bridge, a narrow and old, nay, historic construction. At the end, there was signage indicating that we were to pay $2 for the privilege of crossing this private bridge, with a fellow present to collect the fee. No E-Z Pass either.

DQ

We got to our destination, unloaded the car, and then stopped at the local Dairy Queen. We’d only been to a DQ once in years. I was at the register when the young staffer had to break open a roll of quarters. He was rapping it on the counter, and when he finally broke through, the coins flew all over. I shared with him something I learned from my one month as a teller at Albany Savings Bank in 1978: hold BOTH ends of the roll, and break. The paper breaks easily, but the coins don’t fly away. Naturally, he then opened the roll of dimes as he had the quarters, with the same result.

Tuesday,  June 17

Onward to Virginia. The trip involved being on US Route 15 for dozens of miles, passing through various types of highways, including four-lane and two-lane roads, and traveling through small towns. In one town, there were, at all four intersections, signs indicating “Do Not Cross.” This meant that the only legal way to get from a bank to a Wendy’s, kitty-corner away, was to drive?

On our family WhatsApp group, our daughter was giving us a blow-by-blow account of her trip, including details about getting to the Cape Town Airport and boarding the plane (with an aisle seat and no one in the middle).

Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto. View all posts by Roger