13/03/08

A very good friend of Janes is visiting New York with her daughter, and Jane suggested that we might be able to go there and surprise them! So since leaving Nashville we have driven almost 1000 miles and have passed through Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey to New York state in the past three days
New York is full of MAD, MAD, MAD drivers, I was in the correct lane and traffic was merging from the right, signs 500ft before had said this was happening, when this idiot scraped the door of his pride and joy on our right bumper, then bawled at us/me for not looking where I was going. The fact is that I couldn’t even see him, I am four foot in the air and his diminutive car was so low. Hard luck I would guess it will cost him $400 to have it fixed. Don’t argue with a Chevy front bumper, we don’t even have a scratch.
Before that incident it was even better, we had Googled a route to Andrew and Angelas house in Queens, and were following the instructions to go through the Lincoln Tunnel. When we pulled up at the toll booth, the lady asked if we had a stove, “Yes of course”, well you can’t go through here, you have to turn around and go via the George Washington bridge. Turn round!!!!, how? It was easy really, two NY coppers came over, stopped all five lanes of traffic on our outside, and sent us on our way.
Now we had another problem, we didn’t know where to go, so pulled into the last service area before NY proper. I have never seen so many trucks in one place before and it took a while just to park the RV, when we did though we had entertainment on tap. Number one was that four squad cars were surrounding a Range Rover, with the occupants “detained”, then the dogs arrived to sniff the RR, after that the cops virtually took it apart. It looked like a suspected drugs bust, but whether they found anything, we will never know, we left before they had finished. Number two was that we had decided to eat here and I went outside for a smoke, ended up chatting to the driver of the semi next door. I eventually made my excuses thinking that lunch (bacon & eggs etc.) would be ready as promised. On entering the RV, Jane was not there and there was no food. We had been having trouble with the bathroom door handle for some time, and she had managed to lock herself in just after I left the RV which meant she had been in there for about 20min.
We eventually stopped laughing and continued with the lunch.