I Wonder as I Wander…

We were only home a couple days, before we were off again. We had some interesting navigation in New York City—and some really heavy traffic. We ended up renting a GPS—which was a life saver. I think we still would still be wandering around NYC if we didn’t have it. Even with the GPS, we made a couple bad turns—it said ‘turn right’, but there were several different roads going off to the right.

We stayed at the Friar Tuck Inn—it’s a very old resort—is kind of neat, but a little run down. There are some newer sections that are time-share condos, but we were in the main lodge area. It looks like a castle and we had our meetings in the lower level, which really looks like the walkways you would think of in castle dungeons.

Our meals are included with the room. When we ate supper on Thursday night, there were only four people in the dinning room (including Bob and I), and they served bread, an appetizer, salad, soup or pasta, an entrée (I had Maryland Crab Cake and Bob had Tilapia)—it was really a lot of food. We had three nights of eating like that—plus even dessert when the whole group was there. The breakfasts were a menu that included all kinds of different things and the servers kept asking ‘anything else’.

We got there fairly late Thursday evening and the conference didn’t start until Friday afternoon, so we went swimming and then sat in a hot tub that was outside—the breeze was a little cool, but the sun was really warm and the water was warm, so it felt really nice.

When we were leaving on Sunday afternoon, we decided to drive to Woodstock—where the big Woodstock gathering in the 70s happened. I guess there is a field with a small plaque, but we didn’t see it. The town is quant with lots of artsy shops and there are lots of gray haired men with pony tails wandering around—I guess the hippies are still there. That area is the Hudson Valley and it is very lush. Some literature said it is big wine area.

Since Bob had never been to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, we decided to visit there. We went to Jersey City and took the ferry from there. First we went to Ellis Island and wandered around there for a while. We didn’t take the time to do any kind of history search. I know my dad came through there—I found some information on the internet with his ship name. We got back on the ferry and went over to the Statue of Liberty—you had to have a reservation to go in, so we just wandered around the island. It’s pretty awesome—she’s so big. It was a beautiful, sunny day, so it felt good

When we were leaving Jersey City, we should have looked at a map and gone south through Jersey to get to JFK, but instead we listened to the lady who lives in the GPS. She sent us north and through the Holland Tunnel and across Manhattan—what a mistake! It was 6:15 pm and 19 miles to get to JFK. We got into heavy traffic trying to get to the Holland Tunnel. We could see the traffic light ahead of us changing from green to red and we would crawl ahead about 8 inches. After a long time, we finally got going in the tunnel and then our fuel light came on telling us we needed to get gas. We kept crawling along very slowly. It was after 9 pm before we got out of Manhattan and our GPS said we still had 14 miles to go. By that time we were really worried about the gas situation, so we pulled over to program the GPS to find a gas station. The first station ended up being a hole in the ground, the second one had construction tape all around it, the third one was just a mini-mart, the fourth one was closed. Finally we got gas at the fifth station we went to. Then after we finally got some gas, we headed for the airport—there was a gas station on every corner.

So, after going 5 miles in 3 hours, we were certainly glad that we stayed really close to the airport.