Road Trip 2017, Day 13 (the last)

I knew I was off to good start to my day when I realized the single access from the hotel parking lot to the street was closed down for paving. Fortunately, there was a back way out, consisting of a gravel path winding through a self-storage facility and giving access to a side street. Ah, and the side street was being paved, too, so that resulted in a road crew wondering how the hell I ended up in the middle of their project and having to squeeze way over on the wrong side of the road to get by them. Sigh.

After that, things were much better for a few hours! I stayed on the interstate for a couple of hours, then jumped off to a much more scenic route on a 2-lane highway through the Catskills. Within a few minutes, I found a little roadside park alongside a reservoir:

As you can guess, the drive was wonderful.

At least, it was until I got onto Route 23 and started hitting construction zone after construction zone for the next couple of hours! Most of them were “one lane road” zones, and one of them was so long that I had to wait almost 15 minutes to start through it. And just after I started, a construction truck pulled out right in front of me and drove 15 mph through the entire zone even though the marked speed limit was 45. Lovely.

Eventually, I made it to my meal stop, the Barrington Brewery and Restaurant in Great Barrington, MA. I’ve been there a handful of times before and have always enjoyed it. Sadly, this was not a good visit. The beer (a seasonal Dortmunder Lager) was good, but the food was only so-so and the service was horrible. Given the ratio of wait staff to customers, that was a pretty lamentable situation, and I was happy to get back on the road for the last leg home.

I was home by 6:30pm after a journey of 13 days and 4,002 miles, at an average speed of 52 mph (LOTS of back roads) and 45.6 mpg. My total time behind the wheel (according to the car … I’m not crazy enough to actually track that myself) was 81 hours and 26 minutes.

Not long after arriving home, huge thunderstorms rumbled through, and our rain gauge measured 4″ of rain between then and midnight!

Naturally, I’m already looking forward to next year and another long adventure 🙂