New York Road Trip | Part 1
At the beginning of the summer, some of my friends made a plan to go on a week long road trip in July to New York City. I was lucky enough to join in on the fun! I have to say that it was one of the most spontaneous things I have ever done. We didn't really make a for sure plan until a week before we left. But even though we made a "plan" we really had no idea what we were doing or where we would end up! The trip was meant to be a "go with the flow" kinda thing and we succeeded at it for sure! Be prepared for an overload of stories that won't really make sense and a ton of pictures!
On Tuesday after work we all met at Verna Mize and smooshed all of our stuff into Marissa's little car. If we had taken one more sleeping bag I don't think it would have fit. We started to drive and did that for about 3 hours before we stopped at a beach to jump in and wash up. The sky was absolutely gorgeous, so I had to do the typical thing and take a picture.
We went back onto the road and made the decision to get out of Michigan ASAP. So we pulled an all nighter and ended up making it to Ohio at about 6 in the morning! (Lauretta and I actually didn't stay up all night at all...we slept for a good portion of lower Michigan) Had breakfast at Dunkin Donuts and to be honest it really wasn't good.. at all. I was expecting much better!
Our plan was to make it to New York...and that's about all we said, so we made a list of places we would like to stop along the way. Our first destination was Brandywine Falls!
This was my first time ever playing around with long exposures for moving water and it took me a while to get it right...so that is why this is slightly blurry!
This was unfortunately the only touristy stop we made all day.. yeah it was a long one!
Since we all didn't sleep very much (or at all) we wanted to go and lay out at a beach..and sleep! We GPS'd the closest place we could find and we came along a public "beach". It wasn't really a beach to us though, there was hardly any sand and the water was quite gross. It sort of reminded me Twin Lakes state park, mostly grass and mucky water. It sufficed our needs though, so we laid there, baking in the sun for a few hours. This was the first time we realized that washing up in a lake is NOT normal for other areas.. I'm pretty sure we got mistaken for being homeless..but we NEEDED to wash up..we were all pretty disgusting. We made peanut butter and honey sandwiches for lunch then started driving again! We wanted to make it as close to New York as we could because we wanted to spend the whole time there the following day! So, we drove all day and around 9:30p.m. we decided to find a campground to stay at for the night. To be honest, it was pretty sketchy looking at first but after talking to the lady who ran it I felt a little more comfortable, we set up our tent (in the dark) and went to sleep..which was absolutely horrible. It was so warm that it was impossible to get comfortable and on top of that their were four of us in a two person tent! We set our alarm for 5a.m. and I have never been so willing to get up that early in my life. Soon realizing that we stayed at the worst campground...ever! Victoria and I made our way up to the showers and this is what we saw...
No hot water..bugs EVERYWHERE..doesn't look like it has been cleaned in years. It wasn't just the showers..it was the bathrooms also..
To me..the most important part to campgrounds are if they have a nice bathroom or not..one thing you need in life is a clean bathroom!
Not wasting any time, we got ready and got out of there! We found a town in New Jersey to park our car and take a train into New York!!! I'll leave all of that for the second blog post..keep a look out for it ;)