374 Miles to Tibet

Thursday, 11th April 2013

Map: Bordentown, New Jersey to Burlington, Vermont---375 miles

A cold front broke the heat of the preceding day, bringing a thunderstorm overnight and a cool, gray fragrant morning.  We avoided Trenton by driving the I-295 beltway, which so skirted the city that we were left with no impression of it.

Peeking into a Princeton, New Jersey garden.

US 206 took us north through Lawrenceville and Princeton, both towns very much in the New England manner, with narrow streets and beautiful old homes.  Princeton is especially twee, the homes large and often placed well back from the road.  Spring was especially present in their accompanying old gardens.

It was much more a modern suburban view through Belle Meade and Somerville---still interesting in its mix of rural farms, housing tracts and shopping malls.  Unlike the rest of America, there seems to be no planning for the increasing volume of surface street traffic; the roads remain narrow and without shoulders.  Only the crossroads receive any real attention due to high volumes of traffic crossing each other and stores.  Being mid-morning, the traffic was light and the driving easy.

Sri Venkateswara Hindu Temple, Bridgewater New Jersey.

There's a stretch of US 206 that becomes a modern, wide boulevard in Bridgewater.  Just beyond the Aventis Pharmaceuticals plant we came upon this tasty wedding cake: the Sri Venkateswara Hindu Temple.  Not only did it demand to be photographed, it held a sort of aura of anticipation.  A sign listed a rapid progression from the recent past to the near future---when landscaping is supposed to be installed.  I hope it's exotic as possible and complimentary to the temple.  On Google there are many praises for their cafeteria---and not unexpectedly, a retort, saying one goes to temple to be with God, not a cafeteria tray.
  
The siting of the temple was also a strange forbearance of how the day would evolve...

At Chester, a local tourist shopping destination, we decided it was time for Dairy Queen---but found it strangely closed well past its posted opening hour.  The better alternative of local ice cream down the block was met with a chortling generator at the door: fire in an upstairs apartment had made the building uninhabitable, and they were trying to salvage the ice cream.  Hey, just give us a spoon!

So the quest for ice cream was on.  Patsy lead us astray in Flanders for a Dairy Queen in Mt. Olive Township---only to find a local eatery had superseded DQ in the last ten years.  At least the detour was interesting.

Just outside of downtown Stanhope we passed the very pretty Lake Musconetcong surrounded by old once vacation homes.  A few miles up US 206 in Byram Township there's Cranberry and Panther Lakes, along with several others beyond view.  The granite outcroppings and broadleaf forest complete a very picturesque setting, so it's no wonder that this was a premier vacation destination served by the Lackawanna Railroad a hundred plus years ago.

After jogging through downtown Newton, we finally came upon a vintage Dairy Queen---where we indulged in the Blizzard Flavor of the Month: Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Pretzel.  The middle-aged woman behind the counter must have been new, as she wanted it to be just right: Chocolate or Vanilla ice cream?  No one had ever asked us before, although on rare occasions we'd be handed a Blizzard made with chocolate ice cream, and it was always way too much of a good thing.

"It has peanut butter syrup in it, is that okay?"

We nodded.  This was becoming quite a process, but she did produce a perfect product---not too sweet, with a nice salty/crunchy note from the pretzels.

"Do you do senior discounts?" was my husband's usual question.  One would think we'd have a free day from all the discounts he requested on this trip.

"Um, let me check."  She went back into the kitchen and then returned.  "Yes, we do---but be sure to ask, because not all the girls know that we do."  Meaning her.

Since this vintage DQ had no indoor seating, we leaned against the south wall of the building---sharing the Blizzard while watching others eat their nasty food in their cars.  The weather had chilled considerably as we headed north, but the south wall provided a warm spot to eat ice cream.

North of Newton we veered off onto New Jersey 94, which brought us over the New York border to the rather chic if not rather sparse year around resort of Warwick.  We continued on towards Newburg on the Hudson River when I realized I or we or someone had made a grave error.  Within seconds it wouldn't matter who did it.

My husband was consulting the map, and I poking a finger at it as I kept one eye on the road.

"Here.  Burlington, Vermont," I snapped.

My husband squinted at the atlas, flipping between pages.  "Burlington is way up here."

It is his job to make motel reservations, which we were now doing just a day in advance to avoid driving into weather problems.  I must have said Burlington.  Shit.  Burlington, Bennington---let's call the whole thing off.  He had shown me the online map accompanying the reservation, but it was too focused on the motel for me to notice my mistake.  Yeah, whatever.  Thanks.

Now of thoroughly foul mind, I handed the wheel over to him and he drove us into Newburg---which was also thoroughly foul, slummy and larded with unsynchronized signals.

"Forget Poughkeepsie," I ordered as I studied the atlas. "We've done it more than once anyway.  Cross the Hudson here on I-84 and head for the Teutonic Parkway."

I always call the Taconic State Parkway the Teutonic because who the hell knows what Taconic means anyway?  Of course once one starts saying Teutonic they recall Joan Crawford in blonde braids doing a jig in a beer garden with Fred Astaire in Dancing Lady---and a mental breakdown is imminent.

Okay, okay.  Deep breath.  Let's focus on the God-given graces of the Taconic State Parkway, 104 miles of graceful if not lumpy hills and curves---which so happened to be about the same as the extra miles we'd now have to drive to reach Burlington, Vermont.  Actually, these were graces designed by landscape architect Gilmore Clarke to offer an atheistically pleasing yet timely road trip through the eastern Hudson Valley.  The parkway bond, a pet project of then governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, was passed in 1925, and construction began in 1931 at Valhalla as an extension of the Bronx River Parkway.  In a radio speech during the opening of this first segment, Roosevelt envisioned the parkway reaching all the way to the Canadian border, but the Taconic was considered finished when it finally reached the Berkshire Connector of the New York State Thruway in 1963.

We drove the last 64 northerly miles of the Taconic State Parkway, starting on a segment that was completed in 1935.  Ten more miles were opened to Highway 55 in time for now President Roosevelt to drive the Taconic to the 1939 New York World's Fair.  World War II halted construction, but another twenty mile segment was completed in 1949.  All of these segments balance beauty with speed, the narrow dual lanes and lack of shoulders heightening the illusion of the latter.  The views, even on an ever increasingly dreary day, are quite spectacular.  The post 1949 segments reflect advancing views on highway engineering and are somewhat less engaging to drive---more akin to a modern Interstate.

Of course I'm not going to pay a toll when there are more interesting alternatives, so we exited just before the Thruway at Chatham, moving onto 295 and headed east to 22.  This highway travels north through narrow valleys dotted with often forlorn farmhouses and quaint if not comatose little towns.  At Berlin Patsy's yellow snowflake came on---meaning it was 37 degrees outside, a full thirty degrees cooler than it was when we started in Bordentown that morning.  Spring had receded in the same fashion, now noted only occasionally by the earliest bulbs.

Highway 22 zig zags through charming Hosick Falls, once home and burial place for folk painter Grandma Moses.  I was going to suggest she was the Thomas Kinkade of her day, but aside of her comparable celebrity her brand of sentimentality was based on experience, not fantasy.  Both artists thrived in their era of war and social change---Grandma Moses's celebrity kicking off just as Europe went to war in 1939 and peaking during the McCarthy era.

We were now just 15 miles due east of Bennington, Vermont---but still 117 miles south of Burlington.  I had resigned to our fate, being too tired to do otherwise.  Besides, the radio was suggesting we were doing a good thing---heading as far north as possible, ahead of the snow.  The scenery was winter barren but pleasant; even the crocus had disappeared.  With a good highway ahead of us and few towns to slow for, we could make the trip in about two and and quarter hours.  Driving into a sleety squall lengthen the drive to two and half hours.

Once we passed through the squall, the skies lifted to high winter overcast, with golden breaks to the west behind the Adirondacks.  North of Shoreham, Vermont the scenery became expansive, with farmlands rolling down to the southern end of Lake Champlain and rolling back up to the snow covered mountains.  It's very pretty country, a place to stop and explore sometime---when it's warmer.

We were listening to Magic 590, WROW---its high fidelity signal traveling clearly through the cold atmosphere from Albany, New York.   It's one of those stations that try to please everyone by playing most anything from 1950 to 1980, although I imagine folks hardly older than myself don't appreciate being bundled into their parents or even their grandparents generation.  I'm merely amused, and in this case appreciated that WROW actually has local people behind the mikes regularly giving out real traffic and weather.

A song came on from my extreme youth---one that, on the surface, inexplicably moves me.  For casual purposes I can explain this away with the fact that I did not have television from the age of six to fourteen, so the radio and the popular story-telling songs of the 1970s had an indelible impact on me---but as I grow older I understand the impact was more about a subliminal precociousness, if there are such things.  In that I'm referring to situations lost and forgotten---adult themes in the need of replaying, resorting and restoring to proper context.  It feels like a delicious sort of mourning.

Now, as I write, I have to go back and research the song because my memory of music is like a child's---based on rhythm and emotion, not titles and artists.  My connection to music remains so after forty years; my mental jukebox buttons are always in need of a cipher.

Perhaps the song was I Go Crazy.  The title is suitable enough, and right now I can't spend more time researching.  I can't spend more time in the nauseous space I arrive at via an analytical approach.  As we drive along I'm not ten or even twenty but merely a man advancing in age, and for the moment, open.  A now-dead friend has dropped in for a visit.  Friendships evolve so much after death, after convention drops away---and here he is, just dropping in for a loving moment---a reminder not to resist the moment.  I feel his curls and his skin and then he is gone.

Ah, but resist I must, for I've been trained well.  Now we were turning into the G.G.T Tibet Inn of Burlington and I was wondering what the hell my husband has got us into now.  He had been pronouncing Tibet as Tibbet, so I had no idea we were going to spend the night in some third world shrine.  However, the Tibet Inn turned out to be a clean, comfortable and ordinary if not dated motel run by friendly Tibetians in exile.  Their explanation of the curious G.G. T.: "Gangjong Gesar Tsang is a name for the Tibetan homeland. Its meaning is roughly “land of the snows,” and it is used by Tibetans to mean their spiritual and emotional home, rather than the political nation of Tibet, Phoe."  More interesting things can be found out about Tibetians in Vermont at G.G.T. Tibet Inn, and I was very glad to help them.