I am pretty committed to not taking freeways to get places, but it’s taking its toll on me.\u00a0 Today, Sunday afternoon about 4pm, my plan is to drive to western New Jersey, which was the other place I considered meeting Dylan.\u00a0 But again, I took the scenic routes, and again it was half scenic and half really annoying, and again I ran out of daylight and ended up at yet another Walmart, this time in Dover, New Jersey.<\/p>\n

As always, it was very comfortable once I settled in, but I am not giving myself the proper mix of being there<\/em> time versus getting there<\/em> time.\u00a0 Lately it’s been all day on the latter, not much of the former.<\/p>\n

Monday<\/h3>\n

Along with Walmart, the other chain establishment that is a recurring event on the trip is Panera<\/strong>.\u00a0 The first one I encountered was in Ohio, I enjoyed it, and have been to 2-3 more since. They have acceptable food, good pastries, free wifi, and serve-yourself coffee refills, which pretty much hits my sweet spot for a morning place.\u00a0 Went to another in the shopping megaplex surrounding my Walmart this morning, then headed off to find the Eastern Shore – DelMarVa<\/strong> – as it’s called.\u00a0 From where I am to where I want to go, Philadelphia is pretty much smack in the way.\u00a0 Google tells me to just blast straight up the gut, I-95 through Philly to Delaware.<\/p>\n

But nooooo, I’ve gotta take the side roads.\u00a0 It was the usual progression.\u00a0 I started out feeling great<\/strong> about my decision.\u00a0 Central New Jersey is actually a lovely place – woodsy, lots of open space – forests and hills and pretty colors and quaint little towns, so I was bopping along feeling good.\u00a0 But as the day wore on I got closer to the Philly vortex, and the various flavors of rush hour started.\u00a0 First is the school buses starting around 2:30 and going on till after dark for some crazy reason.\u00a0 Then the regular rush hour, and surprise, I spent the next four hours in rush hour traffic of various kinds worming my way through the no longer pretty or quaint exurbs of Philly, across the Delaware River (very cool!) into Pennsylvania, to a few exits of I-95 to a left into the top of Delaware.<\/p>\n

Delaware campgrounds cost about $30, which I am just not down with, so I blew my last 1\/2 hour of daylight looking for a state forest camping area that I absolutely could not find. So SURPRISE!, I ended up at yet another Walmart, this time in Dover Delaware<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

So the thumbnail of my day is: Dover (NJ) Walmart<\/strong> to Dover (DE) Walmart<\/strong> — livin’ the Walmart life on the eastern seaboard … sigh …<\/p>\n

Tomorrow I plan to check out cool-looking wildlife refuges, which had better happen, because the last coupla days have seemed suspiciously like work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am pretty committed to not taking freeways to get places, but it’s taking its toll on me.\u00a0 Today, Sunday afternoon about 4pm, my plan is to drive to western New Jersey, which was the other place I considered meeting … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2010-east-coast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1253,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/1253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.whufu.com\/wpwhu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}