Selma&Louis

New Jersey, Philadelphia and Lancaster County

Written by Selma-n-Louis on May 3rd 2007 in On the road

We woke up in Stamford, checked out around eleven, and hit the road. Our first destination was Red Bank, New Jersey, and the trip went through the northern part of New York City. It was weird to enter NY from the north, and all we really saw of the Big Apple was a part of the Bronx. We took the George Washington bridge over the Hudson river, and even though this is said to be one of the most congested roads in the area, we passed through rather fast. It was Saturday, which probably helped quite a bit.

Crossing the Washington Bridge

We arrived in Red Bank after a little less than two hours, and went straight for the cause of our visit: Jay and Silent Bob’s secret stash. Those of you familiar with Kevin Smith know what it’s all about - the rest of you should have a look at Clerks, Chasing Amy, Dogma and his other flicks - most of them shot in and around Red Bank and Leonardo in New Jersey.

Jay And Silent Bob’s Secret Stash

We looked around, snapped photos, bought some autographed DVDs and tried to remember if we’d seen the .. clerk .. in one of the Smith movies. Then we went across the street and had brunch at a café, before getting back in the car and setting forth to our next destination: Philadelphia.

On the West coast, we drove for hours and hours through pure nature, with only small villages scattered here and there. On the East coast, it’s really just an endless row of cities and suburbs. The drive from Red Bank to Philly was a mere two hours, even though we stopped at toll booths almost every fifteen minutes. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is scattered with toll roads, and it took us a while to figure out which lanes to use without an EZpass. The price varied from 25 cents to $3, and the amount was rarely presented until we were right in front of the booth.

One of many, many, many toll booths

We told Kitty to take us to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she brought us straight to the entrance. The tourist trap parking in front of the museum was really expensive, so Louis took the Volvo for a spin in the neighborhood - and got us a free space nearby. We passed a park on our way down to the museum, and got to see (and photograph) yet another bunch of little leaguers playing baseball.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is probably a great museum. We didn’t check. We, like most of the other tourists there, were there for the steps in front of the museum - made famous in the Rocky movies. We walked up to the top, snapped photos on the way - and then Selma had a few runs up and down the steps to get the action on film and tape. Even Brad had a go at it, with Louis tagging along, filming him.

Brad on his way up the Rocky steps

Her you can see Mr. Bradford Balboa working out:

We still had one more destination on the itinerary for the day, so we got back into the car again and headed towards Lancaster County.

Lancaster is home to one of the largest settlements of the Amish and the Mennonites, and is also a county with a bunch of weird names on their little townships. We passed Pule and Ronks before entering Intercourse - a place we just had to stop by. Even though it was getting late, we passed several buggies, and to watch the locals walk around in the streets in their characteristic clothes gave us a feeling of traveling back in time.

Buggy along the road in Lancaster county

We didn’t find a place to stay in Intercourse, so we kept driving a few miles down to Bird-in-Hand. There we checked in at motel, carried our bags to our room and went straight out to have dinner at the restaurant on the motel lot. But alas, the restaurant closed at eight - and it was ten past. So we had to drive back to Intercourse to grab a footlong each at a Subway (that we fortunately managed to arrive at ten minutes before they closed as well).

Back at the motel, Selma struggled for a while with a bad internet connection before we settled for the night. We wanted to book a hotel for our stay in Washington DC, but the connection was too crappy for us to get much done. AND all of a sudden, HotWire.com (that we’ve used several times) wouldn’t accept our credit card! And if that wasn’t enough, the Mac started to run out of storage bytes for our photos. All in all, Selma got rather grumpy!

It had been a hot day, and the room was like a boiler, so we left the window ajar. If anyone were to sneak in during the night, they’d had to crawl over a Bible - so we figured we were probably safe for the night.

Bible in our room at the Bird-in-hand motel room

See more photos at Flickr!