Eccentric Flower talk:200907/Howdy
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:200907/Howdy
I always think of New Jersey as the land of Kevin Smith characters, myself.
-- 18:39, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Joy:
I agree with ProfRobert on that suggested approach.
Sigh. The traffic congestion in New England is part of the reason I probably won't ever move back there, despite the social progressiveness. Well, that and the fact that it took promises I don't seem to have delivered on to get my wife to agree to move to the midwestern tundra to be with me, and I'm not sure I could even make the right promises to get her to agree to move to the land of the no-eye-gaze-during-conversation yankee.
-- 19:08, 13 July 2009 (BST)
I-84 to I-91 at Hartford, and then onto the Cross Pkwy shortly after Hartford, which becomes the Merritt (CT/NY 15). That through CT to I-287, cross the zebra, down the Garden State Parkway to where it intersects I-95/NJTP.
My brother-in-law, making the same trip down on the same day, took I-84 to I-87 as you recommend. That has always seemed to me to be a long ways out of the way. Anyway, it wouldn't have beaten any of the particular jams we were in then; I-91 was not actually standstill like some of the other roads we were on, I just noted that it seems to be more congested every time we're on it.
Also, both times I have tried to go all the way across Hartford on I-84 I have had near-collision experiences, and this does not encourage me to try it. The 84-91 interchange misses most of Hartford and that's just fine with me. What I'd really like is another way to cross the Hudson (that's not halfway up into New York State where I-84 crosses it). The Tappan Zee/87/287 area is consistently the worst part of this trip. In particular the stretch from the bridge to the beginning of the Garden State is always jammed with people showcasing the worst aspects of New York driver behavior.
-- 19:35, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Why Wikipedia is, on balance, a force for good:
- The West Rock tunnel "is the only tunnel through a natural obstruction in Connecticut." No wonder it hit me so much by surprise on my first trip down that road many years back. ("What the hell is a tunnel going through here?")
- Apparently we pass over one of the oldest bridges in the Interstate system, and the world's longest stone arch bridge to boot, but since at that point I'm approaching Hartford and waiting until I can safely get to the left side of the road for the I-91 changeoff, I guess I have never noticed I was passing over a bridge at all. [EDIT: Nope. I don't notice it because I never get to it. Changing to southbound I-91 you divert temporarily to Rt 15 and take the Charter Oak Bridge, leaving I-84 seconds before the Bulkeley Bridge.]
-- 19:52, 13 July 2009 (BST)
"The Tappan Zee/87/287 area is consistently the worst part of this trip."
I believe you. (I'm a huge fan of the Hutch/Merritt/Cross, both for the absence of trucks and its scenic value.) The 84 route let's you miss the Tappan Zee, the approaches to which in both directions can be nightmarish. How did your brother-in-law's journey go? Did he hit the kind of traffic you did? How did total travel time compare?
-- 19:54, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Here's another lovely bridge, which we only see from the bottom when we go have lunch in Middletown and pass under it - on the horribly congested Route 9, site of our first standstill jam of the trip Friday. Route 9 is only semi-restricted; when it gets near Middletown it has traffic lights. These are fatal to a road that has become a major artery in that area.
We also hit standstills in the Tappan Zee area (repeatedly), but most of our mayhem was on US 1 after leaving I-95, the final stretch down to the Princeton/Trenton area. This is a truly horrible road. On the way back, we cut cross-country and picked up the NJTP an exit earlier and avoided all that part of US 1. This turned out to be a sane thing to do.
They got to the hotel slightly after us, but they also left their house later in the day, and I gather that almost all their delay was on US 1, which they'd have hit as well no matter which route they took.
-- 19:59, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Things that will reinforce your fear of New Jersey: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eqCBCUawKY
-- 21:10, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Iain:
Please don't neglect Heliotropism. There are five new items today, plus a photo link from last night.
...yeah ... you realize, One hopes, that the central problem is You Can't Get There From Here. Seriously. No RSS. No sidebar link. You have to go to the top page of the journal to see that it exists. You might ought to fix that.
And speaking of that...
Hmph. HMPH! Two of those links prove that you don't follow the links I post, and yet you expect us to follow yours! HMPH, I say!
-- 22:01, 13 July 2009 (BST)
in addition to the YCGTFH-Heliotropism problem, it also feels a little weird not to be commenting on only the single item. i understand there's some sleight of hand to make it do what it's doing already, but...
-- 22:23, 13 July 2009 (BST)
I follow a great number of your links, but somehow I missed that you had already linked Babbage and Lovelace. I can't find what the other one is that you're referring to, and I just had a look through your past few entries.
I'm working on the navigation. I'm trying to decide just what the semi-useless top page is good for and what links I should put on it. The RSS feed for Heliotrope is still causing me fidgets. So far it seems like one of those things there should be an easy way to do, but there isn't.
-- 22:28, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Considerable sleight of hand.
But I figured that rolling a wide variety of comments onto that page was not going to be an issue, because traditionally there have been so few comments on the linkish stuff anyway. (The only times I get comments on links, historically, is when I'm posting a link to some heavy political argument that everyone else disagrees with!)
-- 22:30, 13 July 2009 (BST)
Glad you survived. I have no real advice on the travel -- I don't much drive those bits anymore. I wonder if taking the train and then getting a zipcar for the last part would have been any better? (I know, that's crazy, but it's what I would maybe do if I were going to Boston.)
Sorry I haven't been commenting; I haven't really had the hang of commenting here. I approve of the wiki system; in fact, I think it's a brilliant hack of mediawiki. I sent one of the near-total strangers over. He's mine; and he has a strong interest in journaling systems (I wanted him particularly to read your explanation of the wiki transition, but I also want to be able to point him at our shared history, yours and mine. Thank you for playing historian, despite the effort and pain involved.)
-- 20:25, 14 July 2009 (BST)
ProfRobert:
What do you do, take 91 to 95 to 287 and the Tappan Zee? I know it's longer in distance, but on a Friday evening, think about taking 84 all the way to the NY Thruway and then coming down 87 against traffic to pick up 287, the Garden State, the Palisades, whatever you need based on where you have to go in NJ. Even if it were to take the same amount of time (and cost more in tolls), at least it wouldn't be a maddening traffic jam.
-- 18:32, 13 July 2009 (BST)