We left Doylestown headed for my cousin’s house in Mt. Arlington, NJ. Lorraine had visited us in Belize about 12 years ago with her sister Doreen and their dad, my Uncle Don. We’ve talked occasionally since then, but haven’t seen each other, and since Uncle Don passed about a year ago, we really wanted to see her since we missed getting to visit Uncle Don on this trip. Plus, we had to deliver a prayer candle for Uncle Don to Lorraine from Maria, so we had an excuse even though no excuse was needed. Lorraine and Larry live in north Jersey, just off I-80. With family in trucking and construction forever, they knew that we might have some issues with the GPS directions, so Larry met us and guided us to their house on a camper friendly route. We had a wonderful visit, reminiscing about Uncle Don, who helped the Phillies win one of their World Series games with his prayer candle burning in front of the television. The blessing didn’t hold for the World Series win, but we could all hear Uncle Don saying that he didn’t expect anything else from the Phils. We also had a bonus on this stop, because halfway through dinner Lorraine realized that I didn’t know that our other cousin Mary Ellen lived just around the corner. It was too late to get together, but we had a nice chat on the phone, and her husband Karl stopped by for a quick visit in the morning before we left. Larry took us on a walk around the neighborhood with their dogs Cenzo and Katie, and in the morning we left for central Jersey, well stocked with Larry’s delicious care package of leftover roast beef and gravy, as well as real Italian meatballs and spaghetti sauce, which kept us fed for the next couple of days.
We had a pleasant enough drive south, for the most part avoiding the crazy traffic on I80 and I287 which had made the trip north a little tense. We took 206 down to where we basically knew where we were again, and took a drive past Pennington on Rt. 31 before stopping at the NJ Washington Crossing State Park for a hike. The trails in the park haven’t really changed since we were kids, which was refreshing, and we took a small detour from the riverside park to walk into Titusville and see the school where I went from kindergarten through sixth grade. What used to be a kickball field is now the teachers’ parking lot, but other than that the school looks the same.
We left the park and drove into Trenton to check off the New Jersey Capitol building. The Capitol is just down the street from the New Jersey State Museum and Planetarium, where we were both regular visitors as kids between family visits for me, Boy Scout visits for Tom, and school visits for both of us. Despite regularly being in the neighborhood as kids, neither of us could remember what the Capitol was like, so we treated it like every other Capitol we’ve visited. Unfortunately, the building itself as well as lots of the area around it are under construction, so we couldn’t see much and couldn’t get very good photographs. With all the construction it was difficult to even walk around it, so we spent less than an hour there before heading for friends Carol and Karen in Yardley…after blowing through another EZPass toll on the Scudders Falls Bridge.
Carol and Karen have lived in Yardley for 38 years, so when our camper appeared on their street their neighbors immediately appeared to see what it was. We parked right in front of the house, and then chatted with their neighbors and friends, meeting the neighborhood dogs and letting our dogs get met, as well as giving a few camper tours. We enjoyed the convenience of being able to walk into town for dinner at the Vault brewery, where we enjoyed delicious beer as well as wood oven pizza. After dinner we did a brief towpath stroll to see Pumpkin Row, where about a half mile of lit Jack-O-Lanterns lined the towpath. We returned home to watch the Phillies lose, and then spent a quiet night in the camper in the neighborhood. In the morning we went with Karen and took the dogs for a walk on the towpath where we saw all of the pumpkins, as well as the underside of the new Scudders Falls Bridge which we’d illegally crossed the previous afternoon. We were interested to see that one of the features of the new bridge is a pedestrian crossing, so people and bicycles can now cross into Trenton, and ambitious bicyclists can now do a towpath loop on both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania sides of the Delaware River using that bridge. Tom prides himself on crossing that bridge illegally on his bicycle on Christmas morning when he was a kid, so while this might seem like an unimportant detail to some, we found it significant. After our walk, we cleaned up, packed up, and headed for Delaware with two more capitals, a National Seashore, and Washington, DC in sight.
