My apologies for this post coming out a day late. The worst traffic of any road trip we make is the last two hours through Connecticut. As much as there is a lot to like about living here, the roads and traffic aren't counted among our blessings.
We arrived home early in the evening and spent so much time visiting our favorite nooks around the yard that I fell asleep before updating the blog. The automatic watering system I installed just before leaving seems to have protected our plants well. Below see one of our raised bed vegetable gardens bursting with produce.
So here is our final day of this trip. Instead of backtracking through Lancaster (a fine destination) we headed north toward the Scranton PA area, crossed into New York at Port Jervis, and continued east to Connecticut. We took several detours, a couple looking for bathrooms or lunch and another to avoid construction on I84. As usual, these side trips added fifteen or twenty minutes to the journey, but provided the most fun. Both of our GPS devices lost their signal on side trip near lake Wallenpaupack so we just drove east and then south until we found a little village with a restaurant and signs to the interstate.
Since this is the trip end, I'll take a few lines to write about traveling. The picture above is where most of the journey was spent. On this trip we were testing the navigation and accident avoidance Eyesight system on Gloria's new 2016 Subaru Legacy sedan. I won't turn this blog into a car review, but this may be the most comfortable, safest vehicle I've taken on a road trip. Blind spot warning, adaptive cruise control, lane monitoring, crossing traffic alerts, back up camera, all took a little getting used to, but went a long way to making car travel a lot safer. An average 33.2 mpg helped too.
We also have become increasingly more dependent on the Trip Advisor phone app to find attractions and restaurants along the way. A couple of button pushes gets lists, ratings and turn by turn directions. It is great for answering the perennial traveler's question, "I wonder what is off the highway around here." We used this app extensively on this trip instead of collecting bundles of brochures at the highway visitor's centers.
As always, GPS devices are to be trusted slightly more than the instructions from locals, but expect them to be wrong sometimes. What I love about the always active, on-board Star-link GPS on the Subaru, is that I can drive around randomly, and then press a destination and always find my way back.
Thanks to the many people who took time to talk to me, tell their stories, and answer my questions. I'm the kind of guy who talks to people around me wherever I am, in check out lines, at restaurants, festivals, pumping gas. I'm happy to report that the Americans I met tended to be very civic minded. Most contributed hundreds of volunteer hours putting on festivals, raising money for the needy, preserving cultural heritage, serving on civic boards, or just sharing a word of encouragement to a traveler. Yes, there are some bad people out there, haters and clowns who make money by riling them up, but that's not who I meet traveling around America. As we approach some big decisions politically, I am hopeful, and confident, that the American people will reject messages of hate and would-be leaders who try to turn us against our neighbors.
If you want to find out what I learned about attitudes toward tax revolutions (a lot), you'll have to wait until IRS Nation comes out in the Spring of 2017.
I feel a Fall Agricultural Fairs and Festivals tour in our future. If we make it, we'll see you along the way. David
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