A Good Road to Drive Fast

I drove down to NYC yesterday to have dinner with some of my ScienceBlogs colleagues, and put faces to names. Seven or eight years ago, I probably would’ve driven back that night, but I’m old and settled, so I shelled out for a hotel room the size of our spare bedroom (maybe 9′ square), and drove back this morning.

Not to get all Stan Murch on you, but what I did was I got on the West Side Highway, and took that up to the Henry Hudson Parkway, to the Saw Mill Parkway, and then the Taconic State Parkway, which got me all the way back to Albany. It’s an old reflex– the Taconic was the standard route to and from The City when I was at Williams and when I’d go back to visit from DC, and it’s a nicer drive than the Thruway. The lower stretch is really narrow and twisty, but it doesn’t have any big trucks, and in the light traffic at 7:30 on a random Wednesday morning, it’s actually a good deal of fun to drive it at high speed, with good tunes blasting on the radio. It’s sort of like being in a car commercial, if they made commercials for seven-year-old Fords.

(More rambling below the fold…)

It’s one of those odd roads, though, that doesn’t go through anything. First of all, it’s in the narrow strip of New York state between the Hudson River and the Connecticut or Massachusetts border, an area that even lifelong New Yorkers are a little foggy about. And on top of that, the Taconic Parkway is set off a bit from what urban areas there are, and the sides of the road are lined with trees. You could be pretty much anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, for all you can tell from the road.

It’s also oddly free of landmarks that allow you to gauge your progress, unless you’ve driven it enough to memorize the order of the exits, which I haven’t (I can just about do that for I-88 across the middle of the state, but that’s another story). The exits don’t have numbers (and many of them are at grade, which is always exciting), so there’s no way to judge by that, which leaves one gas station in the median a bit south of Poughkeepsie (which was closed due to construction, thwarting my plan to buy more bottled water there), a roadside diner in Austerlitz, and a hillside meadow decorated with very odd art– a giant Olmec-style head, some abstract statuary, and a creepy-looking statue of a seated figure with antlers that looks like it wandered north from a Manly Wade Wellman story. That’s also in Austerlitz, just before the final exit on the Taconic, which means you go for sixty or seventy miles with no clear idea of how far you’ve come, or how far you have left to go. It’s a weird experience.

I had to fight hard to suppress a reflex to get off the Taconic in Chatam, and go through the familiar sequence of back roads to take me to Williamstown. There wouldn’t’ve been much point, as it would’ve added an hour or two to the process of getting home to Kate, our house, the Best Emmy Ever, and my summer students (and the lunchtime basketball game, at which I couldn’t hit a damn thing– that’ll teach me to play after driving up from New York). I made the turn onto the Thruway instead, and was back in my office by 10:00.

It was a fun evening (pictures may or may not surface at some later time), and an enjoyable drive, but it left me pretty drained. Hence the light posting today, and the current impressionistic tribute to the Taconic State Parkway. There’ll be more normal content tomorrow– lots of interesting stuff has been posted while I was away from the computer.

If you’re looking to head up north from The City, though, I do recommend the Taconic.