EV Road Trip Day 9
After passing through the tip of Delaware, edging around Philadelphia, cross-cutting through New Jersey on the Pike, and skipping New York City altogether, we passed over the Hudson River on the new Mario O. Cumo Bridge and entered Westchester County, New York, my old stomping grounds from childhood through age 22 when I escaped to Arizona. Once we got onto Route 9 North, we passed through the many towns of my youth like Tarrytown (my first boarding school), Sleepy Hollow (of headless horseman fame, and subject of many a childhood nightmare), to neighboring Ossining (of Sing Sing Prison and Mad Men fame), where there is a Tesla Supercharger now and where we left a Tesla Cache, to my hometown of Croton-on-Hudson, known during the mid part of the 20th Century as “Greenwich Village on the Hudson” (as many writers, actors, artists and left wing intellectuals lived there), for a brief drive-through the village, a visit to my old early childhood hood, and to the New Croton Dam, “a 266-foot wide by 297-foot high masonry dam that was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed in 1906. The dam park was the main hang-out for teens of my generation and as a kid, we went sledding and tobogganing on its slopes. It even has its own Facebook Group.” Many a photo has been taken there for use in the electric vehicle blog, electrek.co, and so we got a photo of our road trip car there as well.
My hometown has a typical area history where what happened to the indigenous peoples is whitewashed out, except for mention of a “peace treaty” with the “Kitchawanc,” under an old oak tree in 1645 and the local places given “Indian” names. No mention of “manifest destiny” and the rest of the “founders’ myths,” and no more mention of the Kitchawanc, who were either assimilated or otherwise eliminated from the area. At least in the West we can learn from Native Peoples, some of whom I call, “friend.” But I digress…
After leaving that dam place, we followed the Croton Reservoir north to our next stop to visit my sister and her husband who now reside in northern Westchester near the Connecticut border.
The Tyranny of the Tollbooth, Revisited.
One of the most annoying things about road tripping in the east had always been tolls, which, since I last encountered them in the
Mid-70s have become surprisingly more efficient, only moderately more expensive, and somewhat less annoying…especially the addition of Tesla Superchargers at travelcenters, where, by the way, we lft another Tesla Cache. Those of you who have never encountered a toll road, would likely be aghast at the cost, but since freeways have been historically finaced by gasoline taxes and as gasoline-powered vehicles are going the way of the horse-drawn wagon, state legislatures will be looking for new ways to finance roads. I believe that use fees like tolls, perhaps even more efficient and even less annoying, will be seen as a viable option…just sayin’.
