With the help of our brand new TomTom, we made it off Long Island and out of the NYC area without any further trauma. However, according to the TomTom and everyone we talked to, the only way to get off the Island with a vehicle our size is over the toll bridges, which created a small (very small, TBH) moral dilemma for us. For people in the US it seems normal at this point, but the whole unmanned toll collection on highways and bridges is new for us. We had realized as we drove through the central part of the US that we would very likely get someplace where we had to go on a toll road, so when we were in Rochester, Tom went into an EZPass office to see if he could get an EZPass for our truck. While the offices will sell EZPasses for normal passenger cars at their sites, for a truck like ours they would have to get all of our information and mail it to us, which would take about 5 business days. Since we weren’t going to be anywhere for 5 days we decided to take our chances. The bridges off of Long Island were the first tolls we hadn’t been able to avoid, so we dealt with our guilt and used them despite our lack of an EZPass. We only feel bad because we know that their alternative to a pass is to send you a bill based on your license plate number, and there is no way they will ever either track down our plate in Belize, or, if they somehow managed to do that, find an address where they could send a bill since Belize just doesn’t keep those kinds of records. I’m jumping ahead in blog posts here, but just to get done with this subject, any guilt we might have had went away when we got to Delaware and went into an EZPass office there to try again, and were told that we couldn’t get an EZPass because our truck isn’t registered in the US and we don’t have a US address. When Tom asked what we should do if we can’t avoid an unmanned toll, the clerk just shrugged and told him that they don’t bother tracking down non-US plates. She also told him that all of the states operate their EZPass systems separately, so we don’t even have to worry about New York warning Pennsylvania (which is the next place we couldn’t avoid a toll bridge) warning Delaware that a big red truck with Belize plates is going to be running tolls. We’re not going to go crazy driving on unmanned toll roads, but neither are we going to worry too much when it’s impossible or difficult to avoid a toll road.
Our next stop in NY was a friend who recently started a job near Cooperstown. We knew we wouldn’t make it all the way to his house that day, so we found a really nice Harvest Host farm in the hills of the Catskills and stopped for the night. We never even met the hosts, but it was very clear where we were supposed to park, and they had a 24 hour self-serve store where we were able to buy some frozen goat meat for our freezer before heading out the next morning. We were a little further from Jim’s than we had thought, but we still made it there in time for breakfast before a day full of New York in the fall activities like going for a hike around a small lake, visiting a creamery to get some cheese, picking our own apples at an apple farm, and finally visiting one of the ubiquitous microbreweries in Upstate NY before heading for our next Harvest Host farm stay, a beef farm where we were able to buy some delicious chuck steak which made me very glad I’m traveling with my Dutch oven.
We left that farm in the morning heading back to the Rochester area to see all of the friends we had missed when we made our hasty exit to get to Acadia before all the services shut down for the season. We stopped and had a lovely lunch in Canandaigua with friends Antoinette and Libertino, made a quick stop at Canandaigua’s Kershaw Park for some sunset photos, before heading to Stephanie and Jonathan’s farm which gave us time for another quick visit with them, as well as a central place to stay to see most of the other people we wanted to visit. We spent the next couple of days with every meal booked as we visited old friends from every aspect of our previous life in NY. I’m not going to list everybody because it was a lot of great friends and I’m afraid I’ll forget somebody, but needless to say we had a great time and our big takeaway from the swing back through NY was that we need to visit a little more frequently than every 10 years. If friends are good enough friends that we can get together after 10 or more years of not seeing each other and have such a great time, we really need to make the effort to not let years and years pass between visits.
We spent the last night Upstate at friends Ken and Ann’s with a great view of the Rochester skyline before heading south. We spent one more night in Prattsburgh at friends John and Jini’s with visits to a few more friends in that area before heading into Pennsylvania.