Take the long way home

Monday 8 October 2018

Originally scheduled departure from cool, misty Whitestone, Queens: Noon Monday. Actual departure, with Monica’s mom saying that she’s going to miss us: 12:30 p.m.

Feeling of relief that we finally found the open road: Around the time we reach the bridge formerly known as Tappan Zee. Some of the highway signs still call it that. A magnificent span is this new Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, although the persistent mist and some enduring construction inhibit the full admiration of its sweeping suspension cables.

This Tappan Zee route, Monica declares, takes longer than retracing our tracks over the George Washington Bridge. But that won’t give us the Catskills in their autumn finery. Even muted by the mist, sections of I-86 are corridors of color.

Change in the weather: mid-afternoon. Halfway through the Catskills, the rain-sensing wipers go quiet. The clouds break. The temperature completes a climb from 59 in Nyack to the mid 70s.

Arrival in warm, freshly-rained-upon Buffalo: Right around 9 p.m., after an hour’s respite in Binghamton for tasty curried soup, a southwestern salad and French press coffee at the Lost Dog Café, a couple pit stops elsewhere and a pause in Mount Morris after a dashboard signal warns that there is only 48 miles worth of gas in the tank. How many miles to home? Too many. (Just checked Google. 62.)

Eight-plus hours of travel, but it’s nothing compared to what the newlyweds are up to. At a well-attended Sunday morning brunch in the Hilton Garden Inn in Roslyn, Long Island, where many of the wedding guests stayed, we got a final glimpse of them before they flew off for their honeymoon. In Australia.