BEGINNING: Long Island
END: Gettysburg, PA
STOPPED IN: Bethlehem, PA
ROUTE: Outerbridge Crossing to NJ-440 to I-287 to I-78 to I-81 to I-83 to PA-581 to US-15 to US-30
When I got home from the trip, I saw a commercial from Valero that showed people getting ready for their journeys ahead, with everyone giddy at the potential of the road ahead (and of course, really, really excited about buying Valero gasoline). The road is perfect, the weather clear, the possibilities endless. There is little more American (for better and for worse) than this moment, and the anticipation thereof, the largeness and beauty of the land ahead, the seemingly limitless sights to see.
Of course, the first day of road trips are never so smooth, the potentials of the roads never exactly come into fruition. This is especially true when (1) you live on Long Island and have a very large city to drive through before you get anywhere, and (2) you take a car on its maiden voyage. Thus, I've always found the best thing to do on the first day of a road trip is to take it easy and not require a strenuous amount of driving. If you don't have to necessarily be anywhere (i.e. making a reservation somewhere 8 hours down the road), keep things open so you remain stress-free in the inevitably unexpected horrendous Northeast traffic. Stress in road trips (assuming you are smart and go with people you can stand to be in a car with for extended periods of time) is generally a function of being unable to be someplace where you need to be. So, make sure you don't need to be anywhere. Given the first scheduled thing was an appointment in Berkeley Springs, WV (about 7 hours of real driving) at 1:15 on Tuesday, Monday could be spent driving.
To get there, I wanted to go via Gettysburg since I had not been there yet. Gettysburg is about 4.5 hours away, so we left around 10ish to try and make it before it closed while still sleeping in (and hopefully stay somewhere in Maryland). We got to the Belt Parkway past JFK...and then sat. And sat some more. And then found out via 1010 WINS that there was construction about 5 miles ahead that closed one lane. As I've learned by driving around the New York metro area, one minor incident can screw over an entire road. So, for the 5-6 miles that runs through the Gateway swamplands, which should take about 10 minutes tops, we sat for over an hour. And, of course, the cones were being packed up as soon as we passed the construction area. When you sit, you at least want there to be a payoff everyone-squeezing-into-one-lane moment, not a somewhat unexplained gradual speedup. With going through Staten Island and over the Outerbridge Crossing, it took almost three hours to get to New Jersey.
I-287 and I-78 through Jersey was smooth, but there was traffic at the Delaware River bridge. And as we sat, we noticed the car seemed to, well, limp. While I hadn't noticed any issues with the car on my trip back home to Massachusetts, it is a recently purchased used car. Other than being unable to be somewhere where you need to be, car trouble is the other road trip stress. If these two are combined, then it sucks. However, if you have car trouble but nowhere you really need to be, then you can turn those lemons, well, you know the cliche.
Luckily, we were passing by Bethlehem, which I'm familiar with because my brother went to Moravian and one of my friends from undergrad is from Emmaus (a suburb of Allentown). So we went downtown, asked some people for a place that could do tires or alignments, and brought the car to Strauss Auto. They were able to look at it and get it back in a few hours. We asked for a cab and headed down to main street Bethlehem and enjoyed those few hours! I'd been there, but Bethany had not. We walked up Main Street and she looked in some of the shops, we saw Market Street and the big tree at City Hall. As we walked back toward the Main Street area, we saw signs for the Central Moravian Putz. A putz, other than its definition as a schmuck, is a huge, room-sized kresh that is used to tell the story of Christmas. It was recommended to us by one of our friends, and it was freezing, so we decided why not, and we got in just in time for a production. It was a neat putz because almost all the figurines were over 100 years old, although the music was a little cheesy (I know, I study music history, but the angels are males in the first century AD, not women singing in 18th century counterpoint. Just saying). At the end, the auto company called saying a couple tires needed to be replaced, and while they fixed that, we enjoyed a delicious German dinner and homebrews at the Bethlehem Brew Works. Bethany had the Wit, and I had a Red Bock, and both were just delicious. A cab ride back, and we got the car around 7 or 8.
Obviously, we weren't going to see Gettysburg on Monday, which we had known when the car went wobbly. So instead we drove the two-ish hours to Gettysburg, found a hotel, and planned to see it early in the morning since it would only take about 2 hours to get from there to Berkeley Springs. Despite having a ton of traffic and auto problems, we still had fun in Bethlehem and set ourselves up for a good day Tuesday. Now THAT is a first day of a road trip to get excited about.
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