Sunday, July 24, 2011

Rallies 2011 – Day 10

I’m getting behind on my blogging….

The BMW rally was great! We met lots of new people and saw some folks from previous rallies. It was fun. I’m already looking forward to next year’s rally in Missouri.

Today we left the hotel by 7am and easily made our way east across Pennsylvania and around Philadelphia. While riding across PA, Reagan noticed that we could purchase EZ Passes at one of the service centers. Sure enough they are sold through vending machine-like units. So we are riding around with EZ passes and whizzing through the toll booths with ease. We jumped on I-95 south into Wilmington, Delaware and then headed north on the New Jersey turnpike.  With the EZ Pass we made our way north on the turnpike. We stopped at a service center south of NYC while still in New Jersey and decided to reroute a little to really avoid New York City. We followed the Garden State Parkway up and around to 287-east and crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was a cake walk, traffic was light. In no time at all we found ourselves on I-95N and near our hotel. It was almost an hour before check-in so I decided to take a little detour to go down into old Greenwich and look around. The homes were beautiful but the flora was phenomenal. We couldn’t believe all the colorful plants we saw in people’s yards.

After a little scouting around we checked into our hotel and cleaned up. Then it was time to go see some friends just up the way a few miles. Bill cooked up some great ribs and his wife rounded out the meal with all the fixin’s. I was quite surprised to taste such good BBQ up this way. We swapped some cooking ideas, so I’m going to have to come back and see how his brisket tastes! The sun went down and we called it a night.

Today, we had braced ourselves for some tough traffic and I had added 2 hours to the travel time. As it turned out it was an easy ride traveling 336 miles in 7 hours. Considering the last 45 minutes were driving around Old Greenwich that’s really a nice travel time, especially for a day that was supposed to be plagued with traffic.

day 10

* the pink section of the route was what I had originally planned. As it turned out, going up the Garden State Parkway didn’t add any extra time to the trip.

 

Tomorrow we are going to Danvers, MA via New Port, RI. Our friends told us we have to ride around Ocean Avenue to see some amazing old money homes. It should be fun. Tuesday night we’ll be staying in Bar Harbor, ME. I have a free night from one of my rewards programs so we’ll be enjoying a room on the bay. Wednesday night we’ll be in Lancaster, NH at a resort hotel. I found the place by accident but it looks like a neat little town. And Thursday we’ll roll into Lake Placid for the meet & greet of the Spyder Rally. It’s definitely going to be fun exploring New England this week.

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