I Continue On

You could drive like this in China.  But I don’t.  Usually my wife does the driving of any real distance.  Somehow the assumption is that if there were anything wrong, it would be infinitely better to have her be behind the wheel than me.  She’s probably a bit more cautious on the balance, and that’s OK.  In the States the roles are reversed.  I drive the vehicle when it means driving distances.  I’m probably more familiar with where we’re heading.  I’ve probably done it before.

The New York State Throughway up from New Paltz is pretty if uneventful.  I start out with a meditation that I will keep the speed limited to a certain rate.  This seems sound.  If the “limit” is 65 mph, I’ll keep it under 75 mph.  More than that seems to be asking for trouble.  One assumes the state cops wouldn’t hesitate though if they clocked me at just about any speed over the limit to run me down and inform me. 

The first exit we blow by after twenty minutes is Kingston.  It feels like a good distance if that was where you intended to go.  But with hours remaining, it hardly seems any distance at all.  Always hard to imagine Kingston as the New York State capital but at that time I’m sure it wasn’t any more or less developed than Albany.  Saugerties, Catskill, and the sun is going down now on at 4:00PM. My wife wouldn’t get it, but I suspect my daughters would.  I’ll pass on the opportunity to point it out the childish absurdity of the name “Coxsackie,” the exit coming up next.  Apologies to all who live there but it does sound remarkably akin to how a six year-old might refer to a scrotum. 

I miss the bypass turn and rather than cross three lanes of traffic I resign myself to continuing on straight, which will, it seems, take me right into Albany rather than around the bypass.  It is completely dark as we pass through this tri-city area.  And I continue on for while longer, as told until I see signs for Lake George as I was told I would and leave the New York State Throughway behind, heading off to the right towards Rutland Vermont.  We’ll miss all the fine mountain scenery this evening.