Day 1 of Return Trip: off to Virginia

Said good bye to the Fairfield family and blithely set off for Front Royal, VA. at 9am. A trip of 373 miles, easy. Whoops! it took 11 hours and on this trip we did not stop as often as we usually do for exercise and marking.
I95 proved to be delayed, after 45 minutes we had gone only 20 miles. So we moved over to the Merrit Parkway, better, zooming along till it came to a stop due to an accident. Jack could have kept up with the car if I had let him out. So we got off the Merrit and went West. All good for a bit, then, I thot to try a route I thot I remembered from map study the night before and we got LOST in Jersey. I don't even know what town we were lost in. Drove around there for an hour, thru all kinds of neighborhoods, old and older, crowded and crammed, till we hit the Projects. Finally we found our way out of there with the hellp of the Magellan, whew! Interesting to see so many brick houses so close together. And all those overhead wires, one almost wonders how the rain gets thru them there are so many wires crisscrossed over the roads and houses.

Spent time driving thru the rest of New Jersey, pretty and green, to Pennsylvania where I got a colorful greeting, a patrolman put on his lights for me. Seems he noticed my OR plates, ran them and discovered that there was no insurance company listed for them. He detained me only briefly then sent me on my way with good wishes and an explanation that car rental companies are "self-insured" and it is a bother to an alert officer that that information is not attached electronically to the license plate number.

Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and finally Virginia to the Budget Inn in Front Royal where two doors down there are two fellows sawing on their fiddles and whooping it up. I am in bluegrass country now.

Lots of beautiful country on the trail today, rolling green hills, big flat rocks in the rivers, brick and stone houses and barns, old buildings, quaint towns, lots of quilts and antiques for sale, no rest areas on the roads, not a single one after I left New York.