Roadtrip Ottawa-Florida Return - June and July 2017
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The time has come - a grand sister and family and friend reunion in Florida. We are arriving from all sorts of places.
Alvaro is holding down the fort in Delray Beach. Kristin is arriving from Colombia. Rob and Hild are driving in from Ottawa, Canada (roadtrip!!).
And Adelheid, Bjørnar and Sverre fly in from Norway. See various photos below documenting the events. |
| The Ottawa-Florida return roadtrip took 9 days with 5,808 km and 66.5 hours driving - and that does not include the 20 days of family vacation in and around Florida! |
Here is a list of our route through 10 of the US states. You can see our route there-and-back in the maps below (pink on the way south, and yellow on the way north):
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After clearing US customs and immigration in about 30 minutes, we stopped in Syracuse to see what the old Carousel Shopping Mall has to offer now when it is
called Destiny USA. It is huge and so many shops and restaurants. Our goal was to go to BestBuy and pick up two Amazon Echo Dot gadgets - one for us and one
for neighbours back in Ottawa. Here is a link to see what this gadget is all about CLICK |
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| It is also important to have an Auntie Anne's pretzel with lemonade - to remember the old days in Ithaca. An hour later we roll into Ithaca and get the familiar view of Cayuga Lake. We've also included the New York flag. |
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| The next day we jumped in the car and headed for the town of Front Royal, Virginia. It is handily placed for access to Shenandoah National Park. But to get there we needed lunch - this time at Perkins restaurant along the way. Notice how we ordered each our main dish, and Hild mentioned briefly that we planned to share the food. So the waitress split the two meals into two. Good service! |
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| We stopped in Pennsylvania to have lunch, drove straight through Maryland, and stopped to sleep in Virginia.... here are their flags |
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| At North Fork Resort campground our tent went up in 1-2-3 (+ a lot of sweatting in the hot and humid weather in Front Royal). |
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| While enjoying the view of beautiful Shenandoah River, we reminisced about the old camping days by cooking riceroni and warming up naan on the Trangia stove (stormkjøkken) |
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| The next day we started on one of our main goals for this trip: drive the Skyline Drive through the whole Shenandoah National Park. It is beautiful and 170 km takes a long time because of the low speed limit 55 km/hr. We also had a few stops including lunch. When we stopped for this photo with view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We also took the opportunity to walk a few metres of the famous Appalacian Trail - as the photos show. The full trail is 3,500 km long and goes from Maine to Georgia.... so we'll have to return to do more some other day. |
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| No roadtrip is complete with many many many stops to make a cup of tea - here hiding inside the car because the rain came in. |
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| There is always time for a sandwich for lunch - and our first try of Ding Dongs and Ho Hos (references we have heard so many times on Two and a Half Men). |
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| We needed a rest after the long slow drive through Shenandoah National Park - and we ended up in Blacksburg, Virginia. We took a walk through Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). It was a good opportunity to take some photos for our friend Eija who studied there years ago. One can always find excuses to visit more or less random places! |
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| The next day we crossed from Virginia into North Carolina then South Carolina and ended up in Savannah, Georgia. See flags below. |
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| Savannah was established in 1733 and is a great historical city to visit - many old old buildings, cobble stone streets, and very very steep stairs. |
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| A bit of research told us to go to the historical district and have a seafood dinner. That we did. We can really recommend Tubby's Tank House seafood restaurant where we enjoyed our 22nd wedding anniversary dinner - followed by traditional Savannah pralines. Yum! |
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| Walking around town - so much to see - so many more photos to bore you with (excluded here... :-) ) |
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The next part of our holiday is our family holiday. See other web page: CLICK |
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Our first stop on the road back home was St Augustine in northern Florida. It is the town with longest continuous European settlement - since 1565! First there was the Spanish form 1565 to 1765. Then the British held it from 1763 to 1784. The Spanish were back from 1784 to 1821 when the US took over. |
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| It is a beautiful place with a busy harbour of leisure boats and lots of historical buildings including a fort/castle called Castillo de San Marcos, Cathedral Basilica of St Augustine, Flagler College and the Gonzalez-Alvarez House (the oldest house). We have included the flag of Florida. |
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| The most important thing we did this roadtrip was to stop every day to have a picnic at convenient rest stops along our route. In fact, these picnics were mainly there to assemble the camping stove and make a cup of tea to keep us going. Here in South Carolina on our way to Easley - after having skipped over Georgia this time (flags below). |
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| We had a wonderful stop-over in Easley, South Carolina, to visit Kenna and Dave. It has been nearly 10 years since we saw each other last, but it felt that only a day had passed! While we only just missed Alyssa by one day, we got to catch up with Brandon and his family. |
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| The next morning we made our way through North Carolina without stopping and then found our little motel in Virginia Beach. We were getting ready for the next morning's excitement: crossing the Chesapeake Bay by bridge-tunnel, and crossing the Delaware Bay by ferry! |
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| We spent much of the evening chasing around to get an EZ-Pass transponder to make the remaining of our road trip a bit easier. This way we could pay various bridge and road tolls automatically. It wasn't easy finding a shop that would sell a transponder to a tourist without fixed US abode (and bank account). But we persisted and found one in a Farm Fresh shop. Hooray! |
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| Then we set off across the bridge-tunnel road - after using our EZ-Pass to pay $13 for the privilege. |
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| This photo shows us stopped - engines off - while waiting for an excavator to dig and fill a whole in our road. A seemingly uneventful thing, but it turned out that this was the one and only stop we had in Maryland on the entire trip. |
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| Crossing into Delaware, we arrived in Lewes we only just missed the earlier ferry, so we relaxed a bit and ate some lunch at the ferry terminal. We learnt that 7 December is Delaware Day - remembering 1787 when Delaware became the first state in the new nation by ratifying the Federal Constitution. So that seems a good reason for including that date on your state flag. |
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| Since we were 2nd in line for the next ferry, Mary-Jane-the-car had to ride at the frong with only a very flimsy-looking nylon barrier. It also made for an exciting view when they lowered the gang way so we could drive off at the other end in Cape May, New Jersey. |
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| Remembering how painfully boring ferry rides can be (remember Norway's many many ferries), Hild had brought playing cards to keep us occupied. Some time was spent while Rob, as per usual on this trip, struck up conversations with "everybody" on the account of his loud Florida shirt. I mean, even the ferry policeman came up to him: "Wow man, that is a good shirt. You are camouflaged against that flower bed!". |
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| So we found ourselves in New Jersey - heading to Atlantic City. For us the city is about the casinos, the Boardwalk, the beach - and that is what we went to see/do. |
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| We spent a shameful amount of time trawling the casinos to find our favourite all-time slot machine: Jackpot Party. Great bonus games! Smiles all around when we found them. |
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| Another way to remember the olden days was to have lunch at Johnny Rockets on the Atlantic City Boardwalk. Lovely diner with jukeboxes on the tables and smiley- faces in your ketchup. Reminder for next time: only buy rings OR fries. We couldn't finish it all and were so full afterwards. |
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| The next morning we had a few dollars left on our gambling budget, so we hit the slot machines again before setting off home toward Binghamton, New York. We didn't stop on the way - sorry Pennsylvania - another drive-through state! On top of that, we failed to take any photos in Binghamton where we shopped at Walmart and stayed at Comfort Inn. So instead of photos: state flags for Pennsylvania and New York. |
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| It didn't take us long to drive north, across the border at Thousand Islands Bridge, briefly show our Permanent Residents cards to the border agent (he didn't care to look at our passports nor take our I-94 forms for us), and zoom on home to Ottawa. It was such a great trip, so many memories, so many photos, so little time. These photos will at least keep reminding us of all the fun we had! Next road trip - maybe Eastern Canada??? We'll see. |
July 2017