The Drive to Philly

We are attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA this weekend. To clarify, Nicole is attending a conference, and Michelle and I are exploring the beautiful streets of Philly. To clarify, Michelle and I are roaming the dirty streets of the city on the lookout for something beautiful.

To begin this little saga, I need to start at the beginning. Nicole and I looked at trusty ol’ google maps to see how long it would take to drive from Norfolk, VA to Philadelphia, PA. The directions said with traffic, it would take 4 ½ hours. No prob. If we left around 10AM, we would hopefully arrive around 3PM, check into the hotel, Nicole hops on the metro to get to her conference for the opening lecture at 5:30. We felt it was a pretty flawless plan.

We woke up Thursday morning, the morning we were leaving, and found that we were SO unprepared to leave. After scrambling all morning, we finally got out the door by 11:30. No problem, for the most part. Looking at google maps on Thursday told us that the drive would take us 5 ½ hours. Wait, what happened to that other hour? Okay, so maybe Nicole wouldn’t make it to the opening lecture. No problem.

We leave Norfolk, and head toward the Chesapeake Bridge. There is a toll to cross the bridge. No problem. How much could a toll bridge possibly be? We rolled up to the lady who said “$12 please.” I said, “Wow, really? Are there any more tolls on this road?” “How far are you going?” She asked. “Philadelphia.” “Yes, there are more tolls, but none are this much.” “I hope not!” I said, and then wished her a pleasant price-gouging day.

The drive we took ended up having some absolutely spectacular views. Wow, it really was a beautiful drive. We felt that the enormous fee was dedicated to making sure we had a pretty drive.

Once we entered Delaware, we needed gas. We stopped for some, but then took the wrong road to get back on the freeway, and ended up driving the wrong direction. Not a good plan for keeping a time budget. I took the first exit I could off the freeway which had a huge yellow sign that said “TOLL”. I had already committed to the exit, but was confused by the set-up. All previous tolls I’d seen had some person sitting in a booth. This one only had a little basket with a sign saying “$.25”. It all happened so fast, but I basically coasted right past it without paying. Nicole was yelling, and I was trying to find out how the heck to get back on the freeway. Anyways, we flipped a U-turn, and found our way back to the freeway where I made sure to pay my $.25 to get back on. The rest of our drive was spent researching how much it cost us for me to blow by the tollbooth. It turns out to be a $25 fine. That is a 1,000% error on my part. I can’t wait to get that one in the mail.

By the time we arrived to New Jersey, it was getting dark. We were seven hours into our drive by this point. I don’t know how it’s possible, but that seems to be how these things go. I had an indifferent impression about New Jersey. Like I said, it was dark, it started raining, and the drivers were equally bad, though now there were more of them. We blessed the state with our temporary presence, and a couple dollars in tolls, and then made our way to Philly.

Philly began with a confusing toll bridge (Benjamin Franklin would be so proud of his bridge) that cost us another $5. As Nicole navigated us through the vortex of terror, I did my best not to kill us all. However, when you’ve been driving for eight hours, and the climax of the drive is filled with old twisty three lane roads in the dark and rain, it all a sudden gets very stressful. Every once in a while Nicole would look up from her phone to see where we were, gasp, and then quickly look back down at her phone. Somehow we weaved through the spaghetti factory and made it to our hotel. Phew.

The final spectacle of the night was finding food for our daughter, whose bedtime had arrived. I don’t think we won any gold stars for parenting. We settled on Thai food that was a block away, and went back to our hotel. We decided that we’ll give Philadelphia a chance, but not at night, in the rain, in Chinatown with our one year old daughter. We’ll explore in the daylight tomorrow.