Friday, 7/29, SWEET HOME NEW JERSEY!!!!

So this is it, the final blog entry (I think).  We're on our last leg home.  We
left Hagerstown, MD at 8:45AM.  The GPS put the ETA at 12:15PM.  Plenty of time
to get home and run some errands and get stuff for Shabbos.  But then.... they
decided to close Route 78 by Allentown for a few miles.  The GPS didn't have any
real-time traffic signal in the area so I didn't get the 'Severe Traffic Ahead'
warning and get rerouted.  There was a sign on the highway about it, but I
figured it just meant getting off the highway for the few miles and taking a
local road for a bit.

As we are getting closer to the closure exit, I notice there aren't too many
cars or trucks on the highway with me.  Uh, oh.  They must have known something
I didn't.  So we hit Exit 45 in PA and lots of exiting cars/trucks, but still
plenty ahead on the highway with brake lights on.  The exit ramp was pretty much
standstill so I decided to tough it out on the highway.  It was 4.1 miles to the
next exit, after which the highway was closed.  It took about 45 minutes to go
one mile, so I was starting to get pretty nervous about what lay ahead.  At
times I put the car in Park and would sit for up to a minute or so.  At one
point a woman starts walking past our car up to another car to get in.  She must
have gotten out to get something from the back (she was carrying some food) and
then her husband pulled the car up when a gap formed ahead of him, so she had to
catch up.

We had a feeling we wouldn't make it back in time to get Shabbos food from Glatt
27 (the local take-out place).  So we called our Goldblatt neighbors to see it
they could pick up an order we would place by phone.  "Of course", they
graciously said.  So we called it in.

After the first mile or so it wasn't as bad.  But still very slow.  We finally
made it to the exit and got out at a gas station for a pit stop.  Lo and behold,
who do we see on line for the bathroom??  No, not some Lubavitch emissary for
the area, but rather that woman who was running up the highway to catch up with
her car.

We get back on the detour road and follow the long line of cars/trucks.  There
are some traffic lights on this road so it took a while to get thru them all. 
Finally, we make it back to I-78 a few miles down from the closure.  We see all
the Dorney Park roller coasters up ahead.  We're right near Allentown.  The kids
knew that that park was in/near Allentown.  We get on the highway and our ETA is
now 2:30PM, so a 2.25 hour delay.

So our first stop is Costco to do one last fill-up to get our total mileage
numbers and pick up groceries.  It was just over 8000 miles.  I originally
thought we would do around 7000.  I guess we didn't realize that our van was
pretty packed already and how would we fit all the Costco stuff in.  But we
managed somehow.

Then we go to the Post Office to pick up our month's worth of mail, only to find
out that two months prior they changed the pick-up of held mail to the bigger
post office.  The same post office we had to pass to get to Costco!!!  Aaargh!! 
So we get all our mail and Karen starts quickly going thru it to find Arie's AP
exam scores (American History and English).  She later finds it and turns out
Arie got a 5 on both!!! (Perfect score!!!)

We head home to turn the water on and crank the A/C up and to unload the
perishables before going to Dunkin Donuts for a late lunch (5:00PM) - more like
lupper.  Finally.... we go back home and start to unpack and resume our
regularly scheduled life.


It's been a great five weeks.  We told the kids we'll do it again as passengers
with THEIR families.  We're all still talking to each other, but it was time to
come home.  Everything really worked out as planned.  We're thankful we were
able to do it, thankful to the Almighty for the strength and resources to make
the trip, for keeping us healthy throughout, to Honda for making great vehicles,
to Garmin for a great GPS, to Nikon for a great camera, to Al Gore for creating
a great Internet, to Marriott for having very (mostly) comfortable hotels and a
great Rewards program, to our relatives for graciously hosting us along the way,
to all our blog followers who kept giving us "chizuk" (encouragement), to the Sobels
for keeping an eye on our house and property and for restarting my computer when
there was a power failure, to Accenture for having such a generous vacation
policy, to our colleagues for covering for us in our absences, to all the kind
people we met in the various cities/town/attractions, and most of all to my
family for really making this a trip of a lifetime that we'll never forget.

Signing off for the last time (I think),
Yo, Yoel, Joel, Julian, or whatever name you each know me by.

Final count: 20 bumper stickers, but probably would have had several more had I thought of
it before South Dakota.  Next time!  :-)

Now we can finally get some sleep!!!