So we left Mary Beth and John's somewhere around noon on Sunday, August 18, 2019. The picture above is my last view of their little piece of heaven. But New York City was calling us, so we headed north and eventually ended up on I-81 again.
Almost at the state line shared with Pennsylvania the land quickly dropped in elevation. I remarked to Rhonda that it was "all downhill from here." Actually, it wasn't. The adventure and the wonder would not let up until I pulled Rhonda's SUV into my driveway 11 days from this sign.
Pennsylvania was always exotic to me as a child; sort of like Transylvania or Timbuktu. My Dad's oldest sister had "married a Yankee" and settled in Lancaster to raise her two girls. We never saw each other unless the occasion was sad. But today so many years later, I get to see the state where my "mystery cousins" grew up; albeit from the I-81 corridor at 70-somethin' mph.
Prior to this trip I had been researching my family tree and discovered that down our shared grandmother's maternal line we were one of the founding families of Pennsylvania. It seems our 7th G-Grandfather, Thomas Loyd, had been William Penn's right-hand man, even serving as temporary Governor of the Colony while Penn returned to England. So I guess that makes me a birthright Quaker.
I would love to go back to Pennsylvania someday, with my sister and our Quaker State-raised cousins. I would love to see their childhood home, yes---but I want to do the whole American history tourist number. You know, Burks County and Philly. . . Heck, I might even workout on a stepper so I could do the "Rocky" running-up-the-library-steps thing.
Wait.
No.
That ain't gonna happen.
I was struck by the pastoral loveliness of this state too, with its Pennsylvania Dutch farms that differed from the farms of Virginia. On my trip back to Alabama I stopped for gas in a small Pennsylvania town. I was impressed with the courtesy and good-natured friendliness of the local folks. Sorry to tell all my Southern friends: we don't have the market on hospitality cornered. I really liked Pennsylvania.
So then we're on to New Jersey...and just on the other side of Allentown, we merged into the most aggravating, nerve-wracking, nail-biting traffic jam I have EVER been in for my entire life. For five hours we were bumper-to-bumper, all the way into NYC. Not even the classic R & B and Rock that I had brought on my flash drive was enough to keep us cool. SOMEBODY was cussin'. More than once.
After a couple of route adjustments, we finally got the Hell out of Jersey! That was another thing: Google wasn't doing a great job navigating us. The Google Girl guiding us didn't perform any better in France, either. SOMEBODY cussed a lot about that, too.
So it was official: we were in a New York State of Mind. Rhonda treated me to her rendition of the second Billy Joel song I had to endure in 4 hours. First "Allentown" and then "NY State of Mind". At least we didn't go by Hackensack, or she would have sung "I'm Moving Out", too. I would have had to had divine intervention not to throttle her during the "Hackensack, -ack,-ack,-ack,-ack!" part of the lyric of that song... you oughta know by now.
We're there now. It's only a matter of a bridge here and there...
That one there's the Brooklyn/Queens Verrezano Bridge.
And that one's a bridge into Queens. I didn't catch its name. I did catch the two beams of lights that demarked its entrance. The colors of the lights changed; blues in the picture yielded to greens that didn't get pictured. I couldn't help but wonder if this was an homage to the Twin Towers?
From this point, it was just a matter of Google Girl guiding us to the Air B & B we had booked in Flushing and a good night's sleep.