Our hotel for the night was in Pennsylvania, but it was basically on the border between NY, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Our goal for the day would be to ride south through New Jersey and then head more west into Pennsylvania to Jonestown.
If any of you were following our spot tracker, you saw we got a late start. I hate to admit it, but I had left my backpack at the restaurant the night before and didn't realize it until we were ready to go at 8 am. We were waiting at the restaurant when someone came in around 10:15 am and we were off. Our tracks looped up into NY briefly and we caught this freeway sign as we entered. That's the cool thing about motorcycles - You can stop on a skinny highway shoulder and have your son ride down the embankment and onto a freeway sign like this! OK, not the smartest thing to do but it was our first state border sign we've seen!
After that, we headed south into New Jersey on some really fun well-maintained gravel roads. Hank is still on his Long Wheelie Home!
The roads and forests in New Jersey were amazing! This is not the New Jersey of reality shows, this is the reality of New Jersey. Our tracks kept getting better and better. There was the occasional gate - we figure they are to keep those pesky cars out!
Sometimes some fallen trees
...or washed out roads
Stream Crossings
Are you getting this?? New Jersey is awesome!
Stream running down the solid rock hillside side onto the trail.
Little streams were everywhere and running really well due to the thunderstorms of the previous days
By lunch, we had riden almost 50 miles of beautiful back roads. We were having so much fun! I had a soundtrack of Bruce Springsteen (New Jersey Boy) in my head the entire morning!! Especially "Born in the USA" and "Born to Run". We stopped at this deli in Hardwick, NJ. Again, this was one of those places where everyone knew everyone else.
I was born in New York and I love NY, but today, New Jersey ROCKED NY! I applied my best photoshop skills to this and fixed the sign:
After lunch we continued through New Jersey farmland and eventually crossed into Pennsylvania farmland. I could be thinking of this wrong but I think these farms were mostly Pennsylvania Dutch. They were huge beautiful farms. We wound through these for miles.
We passed this forgotten FJ40. Hank has been restoring one of these and he wanted to take this one home and save it.
I think it might be an early indicator that we've been on the road too long when we find signs like this funny:
We finished out the day on this really neat dirt road:
We continue through Pennsylvania today and down into Maryland. Yes, Hank is riding side-saddle trying to ease the ache. We've travelled almost 1500 miles so far.
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