New York, New York!

Thursday June 2nd

 New York buildings
It was fairly a straightforward trip to New York apart from a couple of pirouettes where we lost our bearings completely in the spaghetti junctions. New York effectively has its own congestion tax as you have to pay around $8 to get into Manhattan, whichever bridge/tunnel you use. Not that it does much for the congestion. It took a little while to familiarise ourselves with the aggressive NY driving techniques which are slightly worse than the LA techniques and then about 30 min to drive 4 miles. Mark assured us this is good going.
After a phone call to tell him we were round the corner Mark came down to meet us with a luggage trolley.

Building where Mark's flat is on the 40th floor

View from Mark's flat.
We parked illegally for 10 min outside Mark's building with David sitting in the car and the boot/trunk open while we took the cases up and then drove to Dollar rental to return the car.  Mark advised us that the fine is over $300 if you get caught parking there, as he knew from experience.

 Son Mark 
It seems hard to believe our journey is over. We’ve enjoyed it tremendously, but are looking forward to catching up with friends and family in Scotland. We leave NY Monday evening and should be back home ar Scurdie Ness on the 7th June.

Our home in Scurdie Ness, Scotland.

Thanks for reading this blog, I've enjoyed writing it  and I'd love to have your feedback if you have the time.
Theresa

Martinsburg to Bethlehem, Philadelphia

Wednesday June 1st

Set off for Bethlehem. Our last stop before New York. It looks like we’re going to make it on time from our coast to coast marathon as we only have 90 miles to go. We need to be in New York by 1:00 tomorrow to return the rental car and we could probably have got there tonight but this way we’re avoiding the nightmare of trying to find somewhere to park in NY overnight.

It was really hot again but thunderstorms are expected which should reduce the temperature. NY seems relatively cool if you can believe the temperature charts.

 A moment of mercy. Sculpture depicting soldier who attended to wounded on the opposing side after a huge battle defeat. His own side started firing at him until they realised what he was doing.

We came through Harrisburg today, an important city in Pennsylvania. (It's the capital of the commonwealth; not sure what that means). While there we visited the Museum of the Civil War as it has a reputation for being the least biased of the civil war museums. They told the story well, by following the lives of several different people most of whom ended up dead, but it was very absorbing and we spent longer than we meant to.  Over 600,000 deaths out of a population of around 27 million!

After familiarising ourselves with the civil war, we cheered ourselves up by visiting Chocolate World in Hershey which is close to Harrisburg.

Entrance to Hershey world

 The cows who are delighted that their high quality milk is being used in Hershey chocolate

We did the circuit on the little train, listened to the singing cows and then, as we were leaving, were approached by someone who wanted to recruit us for some market research into Hershey products. This sounded rather attractive so we agreed eagerly and were taken away to a little kiosk and given some chocolate. We had to take a drink of water, a bite out of a cracker biscuit and when we’d swallowed it, eat the chocolate and answer some questions. I had a tiny little sugar-free chocolate wafer but David was given three big chunky chocolate peanut butter bars. No complaints there! As a reward, we were each given a Hershey bar on the way out but it quickly went soft in the heat so we had to eat those too.

Tuesday May 31st

 

 View from Blue Ridge Parkway near Strasburg, Va

Slept late and woke to a really hot day.  Thanks goodness for air-conditioning.  We went for a walk around Lynchburg but were just hopping from one piece of shade to the next so we set off and headed for the Blue Ridge Parkway again as it runs in the direction we wanted to go and is a lot cooler, being high.  Stopped a few times to listen to the birds tweeting, and enjoyed being away from the traffic but were travelling slowly so rejoined the I85.

 Stone soup cafe

We had left without breakfast as it was too hot to eat but by 2:30 we were getting hungry so pulled off at Waynesboro to find something to eat, but no sign of the Golden arches or our other usual classy dining joints. After circling a few times and ignoring the pleas of the GPS to return to the freeway, we came across the Stone soup café/2nd hand bookshop which sounded pretty good.  The food was excellent and we were encouraged to browse the bookshelves while eating, which was a bit of unusual.

Historical map of Edinburg, Virginia

After that, we thundered along to Martinsburg but when we saw that Edinburg was on the way, we had to stop and investigate.  It was a very small place (pop 813), the temperature was 94oF and one of the main streets was Printz street (Aaargh!). So similar, but so different.