September 15

We’re almost there….we’re in Cornwall, Ontario, about an hour away from Montreal.

We entered the tollway system at 6:00am Monday morning at the Chicago Skyway. Went through Indiana (Gary and Hammond, Indiana, are still as ugly as ever.), then Ohio, a part of Pennsylvania and ended up in Hamburg, NY, last night. Today we hopped back on the thruway and drove through the northwest corner of New York, through Syracuse and Watertown and crossed the border here in Cornwall. (In New York, it’s called a “Thruway” instead of a tollway. Bob says they’re in denial. They just don’t want to admit that they pay to drive on a highway.)

A note to all Oak Harbor friends: we passed Ft. Drum, New York, where there is a tourist attraction named Ed’s Museum.

I enjoy upstate New York – not only is it really pretty and bucolic, but they’ve got amusing names and, sometimes, old-fashioned terms. The towns upstate are not cities or towns, they are all “villages.” I find that quaint. This afternoon we drove along the Aluminum Workers Memorial Highway. (Bob says they have to write that down on signs because those workers all have Alzheimer’s from all the aluminum.) Upstate New York is also wine country. I’ve never driven around in the Northwest part of this state. I couldn’t believe the number of vine grape fields (Dee? What’re they really called?) we saw. We stopped at a liquor store and bought some local wine, but the clerk didn’t know what variety of grape New York is known for……I don’t know. But the red seems really nice.

We have decided to call this trip the “2009 Stimulus Package Report Tour.” We are seeing, first-hand, our federal taxes at work. Washington didn’t get much in the way of stimulus, I guess, at least not on I-90 in eastern Washington. Idaho must be spending all their cash in the southern half, because the panhandle was wide open all the way. In Montana, we pretty much set it on cruise control and went through. Now, South Dakota is clearly spending ALL its money on rebuilding I-90 from east to west. Driving through is dismal….the orange cones are endless. Minnesota wasn’t a lot better, but Wisconsin was okay. Northern Illinois is a mess. We paid $4.25 for the privilege of driving on the tollway, where we went almost 20 miles at 40 mph with bumper-to-bumper traffic. (It would have probably been better on the regular highway.) During that 20 miles, where the road is blocked by the ubiquitous orange cones down to one lane, we saw absolutely NO evidence of any actual road work being done. (Perhaps that federal cash is now residing in the Blagojevich Defense Fund.)

Speaking of orange cones, it is my contention that states are actually STORING their orange cones on the sides of highways (really, what warehouse would be large enough for all those cones?) – it isn’t really any kind of highway improvement, it’s simply “cone management.”

Tomorrow we visit the beautiful city of Montreal…….and then, it’s on to Maine.