Road Trip -- Northeast America 1999

Before the summer of 1999 ended, I went to Atlanta on July 4th and watched an Atlanta Braves baseball game that the Braves won in the ninth inning, and then in September, I undertook an international road trip with my sister Jennifer through several of the northeastern United States and Ontario, Canada.

I flew to Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC, and Jenny and Adam met me and gave me a ride to their apartment, where we made final plans in preparation for departure the next day. I had a round-trip ticket from Tallahassee to DC, and a one-way ticket from Hartford, Connecticut to DC. I had booked stays in Holiday Inns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

I have always been an avid game room goer, and had yet to experience virtual reality games. I had heard that the Dave and Buster's in Maryland had a virtual reality game. Jenny and Adam and I went to Dave and Buster's that night, and I charged up my new Dave and Buster's card with $20 worth of tokens and asked where the virtual reality game was. They told us that it had just been rotated out, so I began spending the credits on my card in earnest at a game that served up tokens for winning, or so I thought.

After a while, I wasn't doing very well and had not won any tokens, which didn't concern me too much, as I had already missed out on the one reason I had gone to Dave and Buster's. When I only had a few tokens left, a game room attendant came by and refilled the tickets on the game. I hadn't paid close enough attention to notice that the game dispensed tickets, not tokens.

And dispense tickets it did. It had been out of tickets, and it required three more refill visits by the attendant before it was done giving me tickets. Jenny and Adam and I had armloads of tickets to return to the game room's coupon exchange counter, and I had enough tickets to purchase Dave and Buster's largest premium toy -- a giant plush Tweety Bird that I still have.

We returned to Jenny's and Adam's apartment at about midnight and there was a late night Tweety Bird cartoon special on TV, and I watched several, including the original few episodes before Tweety had feathers.

Jenny and I departed the next morning in her Mercedes van on my Grand Adventure, and our first stop was to Walmart and the Post Office, to obtain shipping supplies and mail my giant yellow bird to Tallahassee. There was no way Tweety could fly home with me.

We drove four hours to East Brunswick, New Jersey, where I had lived for more than eight years, to visit the house in which Jenny was born. Although it had been more than twenty years since I had last been there, the homeowners knew who we were. Alpine Court, the dead-end street where my brother and I had played kickball with Robert and Mark for years was much smaller than I remembered it.

We visited Welsh Park behind the houses and the baseball field on which I had spent most of my last summer in New Jersey. We went to the public library where Tim and Mike and I had spent so much time on the computer, years before computers were in homes. The small typewriter room in the library that had long ago been converted for computer use had been converted back to a typewriter room.

It was the weekend, but we visited my elementary and middle schools, Irwin and Hammarskjold, and East Brunswick High School, where I would have attended had I not come to Tallahassee, Florida and Godby High School. I visited the high school track, where I had found the first coin of my collection as told in My Grandmother's Pennies. It was to the high school track bleachers that Mary Anne, Cyndi, Paula, James, and others in my third-grade class and I had walked on a field trip to view the erosion, and I took a photo of the walkway gate to East Brunswick High School.

Then we left East Brunswick and checked in at a Holiday Inn just west of New York. We would stay there twice. The next day, we drove to the City and took in my third game at the old, new Yankee Stadium. Like the previous games I attended in the 1970s, the Yankees lost. My friends who are fans tell me not to go back. The Atlanta Braves and New York Yankees would face each other only weeks later in the World Series, and I had visited both teams' games in 1999.

After the game, we drove to Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania, where my family and I had vacationed for several years in the 1970s. We ate dinner at what I called the "Barrel Inn" as a child, and the dishwasher was still working there from all that time ago. We checked into the Mt. Pocono Holiday Inn for the evening before making our trek across New York the next day.

It was a long drive from Mt. Pocono to Niagara Falls, and we made a slight detour to Ithaca to visit my favorite childhood author, Edward Ormondroyd, and his wife Joan, as told in Time at the Top.

We arrived at the Holiday Inn in Niagara Falls after nightfall and spent most of the next day at the Falls on both sides of the border. I walked around the town a bit and stopped into a convenience story where there was a large plaster-covered barrel on display in which a man and a woman had successfully gone over the Falls, and it had the accompanying video.

In the areas we visited, there seemed to be more hotels on the US side, and more shops on the Canadian side. In Canada, I had my chance to play virtual reality, and I bought a Cuban cigar -- because I could. We visited the Botanical Gardens.

Late afternoon, we took our leave of Niagara Falls and drove eastward to the recognized birthplace of American Major League Baseball, Cooperstown, New York. Whatever "in season" there was in Cooperstown, we had missed it. We stayed in a huge Holiday Inn, and seemed to be two of about half a dozen guests that evening. The parking lot was empty.

Cooperstown seems to exist for and because of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and we spent a few hours there looking at the memorabilia and photos. I purchased postcards of all the Hall of Fame members for whom I have autographs. We walked around to the neighboring shops in the little town and then drove east again to the Holiday Inn in New Jersey at which we had stayed a few days earlier.

My plan was to spend my last day of travel with Jenny the next day in Coney Island, New York, as I had done a few times as a child with my dad and brother. I had arranged for Charlie to come pick me up near Coney Island at the end of the day.

By this time in my story, Hurricane Floyd had traveled all the way from Florida to meet us, and much of the northeastern seaboard had closed down, including Coney Island. We had followed the news, and a few days earlier we had known that this could happen. It was very rainy, so I called Charlie and asked him to meet me earlier in the day at Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Being the Halloween aficionado that I am, and having dressed accordingly years earlier, I wanted to visit the land of the Headless Horseman, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There wasn't a lot to see, but there were a couple of items of interest. On one of the roads is a sign that states that on that very spot, a capture had been made during the American Revolution that led to the discovery of General Benedict Arnold's treason.

We visited the grave of Washington Irving, the author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The caretaker's office has a map to the prominently interred citizens of the cemetery, and we were able to drive around to the various gravesites. We saw deer in the graveyard in the rain. We drove on narrow pathways which were actually on top of graves, because we could see headstones immediately adjacent to and with inscriptions facing the pavement.

We ate lunch at a nearby diner and then Charlie picked me up and Jenny drove home to Maryland.

Charlie took me to his house in Storrs, Connecticut, from which he has since moved. I stayed there for an action-packed weekend. We visited Charlie's workplace and went riding go-karts. We went to the Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, a huge Native American casino that was being enlarged, even though hardly anyone was there.

Charlie and Laurel and I went bowling, and the next time I went bowling was with them in Tallahassee on February 12, 2004. We ate dinner in an old United States Post Office that was more museum restaurant than post office, with many of the original fixtures closed off by glass. We went to a party and played pinball.

We visited the Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton and toured the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, USS 571, the Nautilus, named for Jules Verne's tale of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and another submarine named Nautilus from World War II. In the galley was an eight-track tape player.

All too quickly, my nine-day 3,000 mile road trip including a weekend in Connecticut was at an end. Charlie gave me a ride to the airport and we stopped at a yard sale along the way, where I filled the last of my suitcase space with a plastic 25-cent truck for Alicia.

My flights home were uneventful, but my luggage arrived two days later, personally delivered to my house by Delta personnel.

This was my most eventful road trip, and longest in duration and distance.

Thanks, Jenny and Adam, Charlie and Laurel, Edward and Joan!