By the Time We Got to Woodstock...

It seems that this phase of the trip has old classic tunes running through my head. When we left Salisbury Beach under overcast skies we were heading for Kenneth L Wilson State Reserve in the Catskills in New York. I had booked this site as it was the only public campground I could find that was available and allowed me to book one night arriving on a Saturday. As we travelled along the Mass Turnpike the weather gradually improved and by the time we reached the Berkshire Mountains the sun was out and continued to shine as we passed over into New York state and the beautiful Hudson Valley. This area of the state is remarkably beautiful, forested hillsides, glimpses of the Hudson river, and soon we were in the Catskills. Little did I know that the route that Garmin Gertie would lead us on to get to the campsite once we left the NY Turnpike was through the infamous village of Woodstock, which just happened to be having their annual town picnic in the afternoon as we tried to make our way through the narrow, congested streets lined with galleries, craft shops and everything crunchy granola. When we stopped for a few groceries I did find that being exactly of the age of the “Woodstock Generation” had its privileges and netted me a discount in the natural foods store. We continued on to the very well hidden park (how would anybody but locals find these places without a GPS?) and set up on what we decided as our most spacious well treed site of the trip so far. The lack of services wasn’t a concern and was well compensated by the privacy and quiet the site afforded. On our evening walk with Mazy we ran into one of the park staff and had a long conversation that touched on geography, politics, medicare, and the resident brown bear that had wrecked havoc earlier in the day when a camper had been less than cautious in their food storage. Turns out the park ranger had seen said bear about four sites away from ours just shortly before we met him. Maybe it was Mazy’s presence but we never saw him through our visit.

The next day required an early departure as we knew it would be a long arduous drive to get us to our destination in Virginia just south of DC. Little did we know that our route would take mostly along toll roads and end up costing us over $50 in tolls.  But considering that we passed through five states (well 6 if you count DC {New York, New Jersey – our longest stretch and very poorly laid out service plazas, Delaware - $15 in tolls for the about half an hour’s drive???, Maryland (including negotiating through Baltimore) DC – awful traffic along the Beltway, and finally Virginia to our campsite at Pohick Bay Regional Park in Lorton I guess we should not have expected less. I picked this site as it was only about 20 miles south of DC, and with semi-serviced sites it was about half the price of the commercial option in Maryland. Pete did an amazing job of piloting the van and trailer through the heart of the Eastern seaboard. At one point we even got a distant view of Manhattan and the Empire State Building but were too slow to get a camera out to take a picture. And this leg had Springsteen running through my head except for Delaware where I kept hearing my mother singing “What did Dela Ware boys, what did Dela Ware “. (Barry, Andy do you remember the rest of that?)