Peg and I awakened early this morning but made no efforts to do anything productive until we mutually decided to make somebody else cook breakfast. We climbed into Charlotte and drove into Scotrun to eat at a local restaurant that had a big mobile barbecue apparatus mounted on a trailer out front. The actual barbecue cooker was shaped like a very large pink pig and was fabricated from pink metal. They had a sign indicating they had the best breakfasts in the Poconos.
Although the breakfast was okay I suppose this must be a deprived part of the world if this was the best breakfast available in this area. I ordered the combo which was advertised as kielbasa, link sausage, bacon and ham with two eggs. It had some longitudinally sliced kielbasa fragments, one skinny link sausage, one strip of unremarkable bacon and two slivers of perfectly ordinary ham along with two eggs they cooked as ordered. Nothing special. Peg ordered the soup of the day which was called Italian Wedding which she didn’t get to try because the soup of the day was gone despite it only being 10:00 AM. She alternatively selected broccoli cheese which she said was good.
From the pig-decorated restaurant we decided to go south into New Jersey because our Gas Buddy noted that diesel was a buck cheaper in New Jersey than in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania must be collecting the extra money on fuel to augment their road repair budgets which they apparently squander on things other than paving, engineering or common sense. After only getting lost a couple times, we arrived at a tourist information center on I-80 some 5 miles into NJ. There was a nice lady who plainly explained where we had screwed up and then gave us some hints on scenic drives we could take within the area, known as the Delaware Water Gap NWR where the Delaware River divides PA from NJ.
The lady at the VIC was quite thorough in her descriptions of how to get from place to place which was very nice until she decided to actually write down the exact route we were to take including the number of traffic signals we were going to encounter, where there was construction and where to turn to stay on path. In her admirable attempts to give us directions, she soon needed more than one piece of paper and was proceeding nicely until I noted we were burning quite a bit of time without seeing anything other than the attractive facility where she worked. I was afraid she may consider writing down instuctions on how to drive back to San Diego so I mentioned to her that we probably had enough and she could quit. The long queue of other people who had come into the info center gave me the fisheye as I left even though I never asked her to write down anything about tourism.
The lady also told us that since we were going to follow the route inscribed on her lengthy manuscript, we could take a well-deserved side-trip to a town called Buttsville (no kidding) where we should stop at Johnny’s Hot Dogs for a culinary delight. We took her suggestion and soon arrived at Johnny’s where we were to encounter a big lineup of NJ hot dog experts preparing to feast on the fabled hot dogs. Strangely, about the best thing I can say about Johnny’s Hot Dogs is that the fare (exclusively hot dogs and fries – no polish dogs) is nominal, at best. My dog was a wrinkled little thing resembling…uhh…a long tubular fried raisin which had been embellished with a packet of Hunt’s ketchup. Peg’s had all the fixins on it. All together, this culinary feast of two substandard wrinkle dogs, a small fries and two small drinks only set us back $13.50. I suggest that folks pass on Johnny’s if hunting for food unless they are unable to curb their desire for substandard fare at an unreasonable price. Apparently, none of these seemingly faithful customers have ever been to Costco where you can purchase a top-notch hot dog with a 16 ounce beverage for $1.50. Even the concept of this place is weird – having a hot dog in Buttsville sounds like it might be pornographic if photographed.
The NJ side of the Water Gap was very scenic as we drove about 25 miles up the gorge before crossing back into PA for the trip down the other side on our way back to the campsite. The Water Gap is truly a gap in the mountains where the river can go south. From a distance, it looks like somebody removed the mountains for a bit so the river could get through so it could finally make it to Chesapeake Bay instead of going toward the Shenandoah some 400 miles distant. We navigated exclusively by the maps we had after making it to the visitor information center because our other devices (the Garmin & Peg’s phone) kept misleading us to places we did not want to go.