We loaded up our stuff and departed Rondout Valley TT in Accord, NY and headed east into Massachusetts. Our ultimate destination today was Sturbridge TT in Sturbridge, MA, which looked considerably easier on the map than it turned out to be. Driving on the substandard NY roads was challenging but nothing compared to the roads in Massachusetts. Those of us who learned to drive in the west are extremely spoiled because we have roads that are at least as wide as the car and that also run in a relatively straight manner. Those western roads also had mostly uniform paving and are graded such that they do not go steeply uphill followed by going steeply downhill, all in less than 1/2 a mile.
Massachusetts does not suffer from the sound roadway engineering us crybabies from the west are accustomed to. They have designed their roads with what has resulted in highways that have all the paving hazards of I-95 coupled with steep hills, endless twisting low-speed corners, courses through the most difficult to follow paths through numerous municipalities all on roadbeds only slightly narrower than the vehicles that use them. However, the countryside you pass through in western Mass. is quite scenic if you ever get a chance to glance away from the road. On these Massachusetts highways it only took us around four hours to cover some 115 miles giving us an average speed of about…..uhhh….lemme see… less than 30 miles per hour. I may have to just bite the bullet and pay tolls to cross the remainder of the state on substandard but higher speed toll roads.
We finally arrived in our campground and were fortunate to select a site at the very end of the road about 65 feet above a pond. One side of our set-up trailer offers a good, sound walkway and road but the other side is not for the squeamish about heights. The view, however, is gorgeous and the site is very secluded. We don’t seem to be able to hear anybody else in the park and can only see two other sites in the distance. This place is great if you can get close to where we settled. We met a walking neighbor named William who let us play with his dog, Deke, and also let us give him some Pup-peronis that we haul along for canine bribery purposes. Deke is a big, black Lab mix and just as sweet as can be. He makes Peg and me both long for our doggles back at home in San Diego.
We left the park for a short trip to the store and we promptly got lost and ended up going to a town called Southbridge, not Sturbridge. Fortunately, the town had a supermarket with a good grocery selection and we augmented our ample supplies with meat, milk, fresh produce and some ice cream which I have not seen again after purchase. Peg may have done me a favor and concealed this stuff which is probably bad for me but tasty nevertheless. We also popped into a liquor store called Big Discount Liquor but they had a very skimpy inventory of booze and no discounts so we bailed. Maybe we will be successful in our medicinal liquor resupply efforts tomorrow. We are happy to see Massachusetts has liquor stores – most of the states we have passed through since April 1 have almost no liquor stores despite being the region of the moonshiners. It’s bizarre that those who manufactured so much bathtub alcohol have enacted laws which make it extremely difficult to actually acquire booze of any sort. These are the very same states where we observed Baptist churches tucked between a gun store and a strip club or a tobacco discount outlet and a cathouse.