Cross Country Road Trip 2012: New York

Our cross country road trip recap begins! My apologies for taking so long on this.

Here’s how we’re going to do this thing: I’m going to blog our cross country road trip (Boston, MA to Portland, OR) state by state. That way, folks can reference the things we did by state/region and it’ll be easier to look up later. I’m also going to try to post twice a day (two states per day) for the next 6 days – we have 12 states to cover and I don’t want to wait anymore!

To recap, we drove 3,815 miles through 12 states, coast to coast. Our route took us through New York, Ontario in Canada, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, to Portland, Oregon. Check out the route:

So, with that, let’s go!

Our journey began in Massachusetts, obviously. I had the Friday we left off from work which left ample time for packing and last minute errand running. When John finally got out of work we picked up the rental car, went home and packed everything up, and were off!

One sidenote about what we packed: we each had a backpack for everyday things, we each then had a small suitcase filled with clothes (those two items were brought on the plane ride home as the standard carry on plus one personal item), we also packed a huge snack bag and a cooler bag with 2 gallons of water, peanuts, fruit leather, Cheez Its, granola bars, and trail mix at all times (just in case, you can’t be too careful driving across the country), and the last thing we packed was our hugest suitcase, empty, to collect souvenirs along the way (which got checked at the airport on the flight home).

We hopped on I-90W and were off. It’s funny, we were on 90W for the majority of the drive to Oregon. It still blows my mind that one road stretches from one coast to the other. Also cool is that I-90W is a toll road and my MA registered Fast Lane pass worked at every single toll we hit.

Thankfully it was a gorgeous afternoon and Massachusetts is a lovely state to drive through. The sun started to set just as we drove through the Berkshires. So pretty.

At about 8PM we finally reached New York!

With about 3 hours of driving under our belt, it was time to stop in Troy, NY for some Dinosaur BBQ.

The Troy location is a great alternative to the Syracuse location (you know, the one you have to wait a minimum of 2 hours at before you get seated). They have some of the best BBQ I’ve ever tasted. They’re doing it right!

Though it was late, we soldiered on 2 more hours in the car until we reached Auburn, NY, our destination for the night. Our hotel in Auburn left something to be desired but it was the worst one of the whole trip and we got it over with early. You can’t win ‘em all.

We woke up in Auburn, took a requisite early morning trip to Wegman’s, and were off to Canada!