New England

An uneventful day of driving yesterday.  We made it as far as Sturbridge, MA before we packed it in and pulled up to the Hampton Inn to catch a little shuteye.

We did have a bird strike on the highway in Pennsylvania when it tried to fly across the freeway and didn’t quite get enough altitude as it was swerving to avoid the car up to my right.  The bird got caught in their wake and bounced off my windshield.  No damage to the car, but I’m not sure about the bird.

At the Holiday Inn Express that we stayed at yesterday (Friday/Saturday), they had the most amazing machine that made pancakes.  You just pressed a button, and they came out the end just like a photocopier.  Who says that innovation is dead in this country; just think… a pancake making copier.

It’s amazing for as densely populated the east coast is (when you look at nighttime photographs you see so many lights), we drove through vast vistas of woodlands as we traversed Pennsylvania on I-84, beautiful.

Daniel and I talked about music as well as other topics, but he played my examples of all kinds of new things, some of them quite good, but others quite screeching.  At least we agree on many… including Ellington.

When we grazed the corner of New Jersey around 19:00 we stopped for fuel, diesel was an unbelievable price of $3.85/gallon; hadn’t seen that price for a while, so I was glad to find that as we saw it later in Hartford for $4.27.  We had dinner at an interesting Dairy Queen that had both soft serve and scoop ice cream.  I don’t believe that I have ever seen that before; had to be a franchise operation.  The quality of the food was very good, but as I bit into a hot onion ring, I did exactly what the comic, Prescott Tolk talked about on, The Sound of Young America that we had been listening to just before we stopped, when they aired a bit where he talked about what people do when they put hot food into their mouths.  We laughed so hard I couldn’t believe the two bikers and their chicks that were sitting at the next table didn’t get all up in our grills about what we were laughing about.

Daniel is now up and getting ready to go so we can get on the road and be in Maine for the reunion at lunchtime.