Road Trip - Part 1

4:45 am and the alarm clock started beeping. With that, the road trip had begun.

I don't make a habit of getting up that early. In fact, I could probably count the number of sunrises I've seen in my entire life on two hands. Heck, probably on one. But we had a long day ahead of us and I had the timeline planned out. We needed to be on the road around 5 to ensure getting everything accomplished.

I had rented a "car" the day before because let's face it, my Mustang isn't a vehicle meant for traveling and I wasn't taking my Jeep with it's pathetic 16 mpg on a trip. Note that car is in quotations in that last sentence. I do that because I booked a premium car and when I went to Enterprise Rent A Car they said they didn't have any premium cars. They offered me a van, which I declined. I was just about to drive through 4 states and there was no way I was doing that in a van. We compromised on a Kia Sportage. I wasn't happy with this, as Enterprise has a history of not having the right vehicle class in stock despite booking months in advance, but nothing was going to spoil the trip.

5:15 and we're on the road. Sharon was trapped in the backseat with our dog Eli who was surprisingly full of energy considering the sun wasn't up yet. We caught the turnpike and around 8:30 we approached the outskirts of Centralia, PA, our first stop.

I first read about Centralia around 8 years ago. It was an ordinary small town up north central PA until 1962 when a fire at a dump reached the anthracite coal mines which ran underground. The fire caught on in the mines and has been burning ever since. Most of the residents relocated throughout the years as the fires spread underground but a few die hards remain (population is officially listed as 12). Seeing the empty streets, the roads going to nowhere, was haunting. Add in the pungent smell of sulfur and wisps of smoke steaming from the ground (not holes in the ground either, the smoke actually rises from the ground itself) and you can get a pretty good feel for why the town of Centralia helped inspire the "Silent Hill" video game and film franchise.

We spent around half an hour in Centralia. I photographed some of the sites there, a few empty buildings, and the town fire truck, which is just painfully ironic. In retrospect, I wish I would have spent more time there, but I knew our schedule was going to be tight that day so I felt it best to get back on the road. Shortly afterwards I was driving by a tractor trailer at around 70mph when a tire caught the edge of the rough berm. The Kia started to swerve and with a 15 foot ravine on one side and a speeding tractor trailer on the other, things looked bleak. Everything seemed to be in slow motion and fast forward at the same time but I somehow managed to get the SUV back under control. We all breathed a sigh of relief that the road trip didn't end in death and destruction.

We made a quick detour to McDonald's for bathroom breaks and breakfast and then headed northeast toward New York. It's about a 4 hour drive, and we made one more short stop in Jersey which had a really cool "Scenic Overlook". The sky was gloomy all morning, but the view was still stunning. We were a bit behind schedule so we didn't rest too long.

We made good time to NY and traffic heading toward the city wasn't bad at all. We were heading to Long Island which involved crossing several bridges. I didn't know they charged tolls to cross the bridges but was lucky to have brought cash. I needed it too as 3 bridges ended up costing $18 in tolls. Sharon grabbed the obligatory "through the windshield" photo of the George Washington bridge at 50+ mph and I love everything about it.

We hit Long Island right on schedule. Anyone who knows me knows that I love horror movies with every fiber of my being and that's what brought about this portion of the trip. We first stopped in Farmingdale, NY to find a cemetery. At the cemetery is the grave of the Defeo family. In 1974 their oldest son, Ronald Defeo, killed his parents and siblings with a shotgun. He'd later say that he was possessed by the devil and that's what made him murder his family. Whether that dubious claim has any merit is certainly up for debate, but his story also lead to the house becoming "in"famous 1 year later when it was purchased by George and Kathy Lutz. The Lutz's lived in the house at 112 Ocean Avenue for exactly 28 days before taking flight in the middle of the night, leaving all of their belongings behind. They too would say the house was evil and they told their story to the world. It became the Amityville Horror.

I've always been a fan of the films and books about the case and seeing the real house was surreal. They took out the "eye" windows on the second story and replaced them with less ominous rectangular ones, but it's still clearly the house I've seen and read so much about. Apparently no one was home when we stopped there, so I had ample time to take photos. We even headed to the other side of the river behind the house to get some shots of the rear (I don't know if the ducks in the photo were evil or not). We were actually ahead of schedule so we stopped at a local antique store hoping to find some trinket we could tell everyone we bought in Amityville, but alas came up empty handed.

Finished in Amityville, we headed toward our next stop - Coney Island. About half way there, the rain started. It was a light mist at first, but grew worse as we drove on. By the time we arrived at Coney Island, the weather was miserable. Being right beside the ocean, the wind was whipping and it was freezing cold. The rain was coming down in sheets and as a result, the boardwalk was barren. We walked down to the ocean, but the fog was so thick you could only see a few dozen yards. It was quite disappointing as I'd planned to spend several hours there touring the sites and photographing people for "100" but the weather just wasn't on our side.

We only lasted an house in the weather before retreating to the car. I did make sure we got some hot dogs at Nathan's Famous. I'm not used to paying $2.75 per hot dog, but the experience was worth it and they did taste pretty good. It was only 3pm but the weather wasn't improving so we decided to head north to Connecticut to find a hotel room.

Driving out of Brooklyn proved to be much more challenging than driving in. The drive to our hotel in Torrington was supposed to take 2 hours and in reality it took over 5. Traffic was brutal leaving the city and once we were out, we hit a major traffic jam on the interstate. My TomTom GPS rerouted us, but we lost a lot of time. Fortunately we were finished for the day and didn't miss any planned stops. At the hotel, I noticed a "trap door"(random photo below) in the ceiling and was afraid we'd stepped into the movie Vacancy. All night long I was waiting for men in masks to burst through that door and make us the stars of their own twisted snuff film. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

Aside from the nasty weather in Coney Island and almost dying in early in the morning, the trip was off to a fantastic start. As the day ended, thunderstorms rolled into Torrington, Connecticut and I was afraid the rest of the trip would be a washout.