Driving

Rehan and I had so much time until we needed to go to the wedding.  A couple of weeks in fact.  He had seen off Nikki and other people who were coming to the wedding hadn't arrived yet.  With so much time on our hands, we decided to go on a bit of a road trip.

Before we set off, I wanted a good hearty breakfast.

Being in New York, there was nowhere else I wanted to go other than Barney Greengrass.  I had tried it with Andy the last time I was in New York, and so this was another opportunity to go to one of my favourite places in the city.  The lox and eggs were as good as I remembered.

After breakfast, we jumped on the subway and went to JFK airport.  It was a long trip.  We changed trains at Jamaica station, switching the far newer airport train.  The trip was much cheaper than a cab, but given how long it took I'm not sure it was necessarily worth it.  We weren't at JFK for a flight, but rather to pick up our hire car.  We started off on our road trip, heading east towards New Jersey.

We were going to drive south down towards Virginia.  We were both looking forward to this trip.  Rehan had already been in the US for a few months, so he had gotten used to driving on the right side of the road.  I on the other hand had never driven on this side of the road, so I let him have the honour of driving first.  We drove along the Belt Parkway until we crossed the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge.

The roads were definitely not what I expected.  The quality of the road maintenance was mediocre at best, but probably better described as appalling.  There were potholes, cracks and general degradation everywhere.  Lines weren't well drawn and there were several sections where different lanes hadn't been graded properly.  We kept driving and turned towards Philadelphia.