Whoo....

Quite a day today. I left Mel and Joe's house around 10 to drive down to Washington DC. The night before I had made a careful study of the route to DC so that I could avoid the horrible tolls crossing Delaware. They charge 7 freaking dollars to drive across 11 miles of their tiny little state. Total BS. RI is free and it's almost 40 miles across ole Rhody. In any case, I tool drastic measures heading west to Harrisburg on route 78 and then south on 83 to meet up with 95 around Baltimore. This reduced my tolls for the whole trip to $1.45. Bingo!

However, I made my first gas price mistake of the trip. Gas in Jersey was 2.95 or so but I foolishly did not fill up and just drove on into Pennsylvania with half a tank. I ended up paying 3.25 a gallon in PA. I only added 6 gallons in the hopes of finding cheaper prices in or around DC. Gas is cheaper here but not by too much.

It also appears my parents had been holding out on me in my childhood. Route 78 goes right through Bethlehem, PA which is where my Uncle Butch and his family live. However when I drove through there on 78 there was a sign for Waffle House! And we had never been to Waffle House there. Seems like a horrible case of parental neglect, depriving my sister and I of Waffle House. In fact, keeping us ignorant until reaching adulthood might be criminal. My parents are fantastic in most ways, but sometime there are oversights that can not be explained by rational waffle-eating people.

In addition this route allowed me to visit the Troegs Brewery in Harrisburg (there should be a sideways ":" over the o in Troegs, but I am not sure how to do that in this program.) Troegs brews some good beer placing their Nugget Nectar at #30 on the Beer Advocate Top 100. The Nugget Nectar only comes out once a year in February and I figured that they might still have some available since we are barely into March. Well I got to the brewery slightly before 1 with only a few wrong turns. I had a couple samples of their beer (Troegenator Dopplebock and Nugget Nectar) while I perused their merchandise (which would have been more attractive had I ever tried their beer before) and bemoaned the fact that they did not sell six packs or singles. Well the very nice girl who runs the retail store told me where to find six packs at a bar down the street. And although I felt a little bad about having two samples and not buying anything, I went down the street to find Troegs beer in volumes that would fit in my car.

Once the beer was successfully purchased I was on my way south to DC. I was almost to the Beltway in Maryland when some kind of accident blocked all four lanes of traffic on 95. I pulled a U turn on one of those police turnabouts after sitting at a dead stop for about ten minutes longer than I should have. I managed to navigate off interstate to reach the Beltway and I got to Pete's place in short order.

I immediately offered Pete one of my Troegs brews (Nugget Nectar) which he greatly enjoyed, and of course I chose not to let him drink alone and had one myself. After a little catching up we decided to head out to find some food, but I'll cover that in my next post: Unexpected Beer Bar. (also a driving time/distance update)