Error
One more New York City picture, taken as I was trying to navigate myself out of the city along the most reasonable path I could come up with pointing to our eventual destination on Long Island. At this point, I was impressing Robin with my navigational abilities, as I'd managed to make my way across the Harlem River into the Bronx and toward Interstate 87, the Major Deegan Expressway. I found 87 just fine, and took the appropriate ramp heading south toward the intersection I wanted to make with I-278 so I could cross the Robert Kennedy Bridge over a piece of the East River called the Hell's Gate, which I don't think I've ever crossed. But then I blew all the good will by misreading a sign I caught for about a half-second and heading north on 278 instead of south. I knew I was making the mistake almost as I made it, but there was nothing to do about it except kick myself in the head mentally. There's a signage issue I could blame -- 278 is technically considered an east-west highway, but at this point it's running north-south, and both directions curve off to the east, and the east I wanted was labelled west -- but I should have known better anyway.
New York's unnecessarily repetitive excessive redundancy made this easy to fix -- though it also dropped me into a bunch of construction I'd have enjoyed avoiding. All I had to do was continue north ... er, east along 278 until I intersected roads taking me across either the Whitestone or Throgs Neck Bridges -- dealer's choice there -- but still. I'd been hoping to show off.
We'd have a similar moment later in the trip at Buffalo.
Incidentally, the day after this, the New York City area was hit by one of those not-as-freaky-as-they-used-to-be climate change rainstorms that dumped more than 3 inches of rain on northern parts of the city in a half-hour or so, flooding a lot of the path we'd taken today and would take toward the end of the week. The Major Deegan Expressway (I-87), for instance, wound up drowned in 14 inches of standing water. If we'd made this pass through the city just 24 hours later, we'd have been -- as my first wife used to say -- screwed with a capital 'F'. As it was, the rain mostly skipped us where we were on eastern Long Island.
That's where we're going next: Eastern Long Island.
Error
One more New York City picture, taken as I was trying to navigate myself out of the city along the most reasonable path I could come up with pointing to our eventual destination on Long Island. At this point, I was impressing Robin with my navigational abilities, as I'd managed to make my way across the Harlem River into the Bronx and toward Interstate 87, the Major Deegan Expressway. I found 87 just fine, and took the appropriate ramp heading south toward the intersection I wanted to make with I-278 so I could cross the Robert Kennedy Bridge over a piece of the East River called the Hell's Gate, which I don't think I've ever crossed. But then I blew all the good will by misreading a sign I caught for about a half-second and heading north on 278 instead of south. I knew I was making the mistake almost as I made it, but there was nothing to do about it except kick myself in the head mentally. There's a signage issue I could blame -- 278 is technically considered an east-west highway, but at this point it's running north-south, and both directions curve off to the east, and the east I wanted was labelled west -- but I should have known better anyway.
New York's unnecessarily repetitive excessive redundancy made this easy to fix -- though it also dropped me into a bunch of construction I'd have enjoyed avoiding. All I had to do was continue north ... er, east along 278 until I intersected roads taking me across either the Whitestone or Throgs Neck Bridges -- dealer's choice there -- but still. I'd been hoping to show off.
We'd have a similar moment later in the trip at Buffalo.
Incidentally, the day after this, the New York City area was hit by one of those not-as-freaky-as-they-used-to-be climate change rainstorms that dumped more than 3 inches of rain on northern parts of the city in a half-hour or so, flooding a lot of the path we'd taken today and would take toward the end of the week. The Major Deegan Expressway (I-87), for instance, wound up drowned in 14 inches of standing water. If we'd made this pass through the city just 24 hours later, we'd have been -- as my first wife used to say -- screwed with a capital 'F'. As it was, the rain mostly skipped us where we were on eastern Long Island.
That's where we're going next: Eastern Long Island.