We watched the Wisconsin Badgers’ football game last night until halftime and went to bed. We were both tired. This morning we woke up to find out that we had a win against Iowa. Woo-hoo! It was a cloudy, cool morning of 55 degrees and I felt sorry for those tent campers across the road from us. They looked cold as they sat around the fire. I remember those days all too well. We made plans to leave early today hoping to beat some traffic as we bypass New York City and miss some of the predicted rain. Since we stayed connected to the truck, we didn’t have much to do to get ready to leave. We pulled out of the campground at 9:30 with about a 3 1/2 hour drive of 185 miles today, if we don’t run into any problems. We stopped for gas before jumping on the New York Thruway(toll) and traffic was pretty light for this Sunday morning.
We crossed into New Jersey around 10:30 and took the Garden State Parkway (toll) south.
These message boards above the highway gave important information to drivers.
Having an I-Pass (EZ Pass) came in really handy to make going through the toll plazas a breeze. Thanks, Mary!
Traffic near Newark got a little heavier, but thinned out again. It was a very pleasant drive.
We crossed the Governor Alfred E. Driscoll Bridge over Raritan Bay and the river. I could see down the river for quite a ways.
The bridge was 6 lanes wide going in our direction, so even though traffic was heavier, it flowed easily.
Light rain started to fall as we crossed the bridge and continued on our drive south. We saw no semi-trucks, delivery trucks, and very few buses or RV’s on the Garden State Parkway. Maybe it was due to the fact that it was a toll road, but we were beginning to think that we did something wrong or missed a sign telling us something important. Either way, it was nice not to have to deal with the trucks. Traffic lightened up considerably the farther south we got. We crossed the Mullica River and the wildlife refuge/salt marsh area.
The rain let up by the time we reached our exit just north of Atlantic City. We arrived at our campground, Shady Pines, at 1:00.
It was still raining, but after checking in, we took site #51 and set up camp in our raincoats.
Shortly after we got set up, the rain came down harder for awhile. It seems that we would have rain off and on all day. We cooked an indoor meal of spaghetti and waited for a break in the rain to give Auggie his walk. We made plans to go into Atlantic City tomorrow and do the boardwalk because Monday had a better weather forecast than Tuesday. Bob commented that the drive today was a lot better than he expected–less traffic, better roads, no slow-downs–and that whatever we paid in tolls was well worth it!
[Bob wanted to tell all my readers the story about the “Lost Trailer Keys” so here it is, as told by Bob.]
The day we went to the Cog Railway at Mt. Washington with Patti and Mike, Cindy locked the trailer up and threw the trailer keys in her backpack because Mike volunteered to drive that day. On the ride up the mountain, as the altitude increased the temperature dropped. Cindy was getting cold, so she pulled her jacket out of her backpack, which must have spilled the keys onto the floor. With the steepness of the ride up, the keys might have actually slid backwards underneath the bench we were sitting on. We reached the top and disembarked. They reloaded the train and our train went back down the mountain. We finished the day and got back to the campground where Cindy looked in her backpack for the keys. They were nowhere to be found. So there we were, late in the day, locked out of the trailer, with the truck keys in the camper because Mike had driven his truck today. It was all being guarded by Auggie. So I, patiently and quietly, went over to the truck and opened it up using the key pad for the door, got out the spare set of keys we keep in the glove compartment, and calmly opened the door–no screaming, no shouting, no yelling. Mike’s truck was thoroughly searched to no avail. Two days of calling the Cog Railway trying to get them to look into their ‘lost and found’ proved unfruitful. So then, for the rest of our trip, we only had one door key for the trailer and one key for the lock of the tongue of the trailer. A call to the trailer manufacturer got us another key for the trailer which we 2-day aired to our next campground. Cindy has voluntarily not touched the trailer keys since that time.
[So there you have the “rest of the story”.]
