Home from NY

We drove home from Larchmont to Chapel Hill today, taking a slightly different route.  At the start, we took the New York Thruway rather than the West Side Highway down to the GWB, owing to traffic, and as we curled slowly around the entrance ramp to the Cross-Bronx, it was hard not to take note of the masses of filthy, melted plastic bottles that people had tossed out of their windows along with other assorted trash.  Nor could I say I could really blame them, because when you think of how the highways cut through the old Bronx nabes like they were nothing so that Moses could get suburbanites in and out of Manhattan and or from NJ to Connecticut, it's hard not to see the communities themselves as much other than human trash.

Further south, we took 301 from just past the Delaware Memorial Bridge all the way down to just north of Richmond, effectively skipping all but the easternmost edge of the DC-Baltimore sprawl. Maybe 30-45 minutes longer than using 95 and all its tributaries through there.  Or, depending on traffic, maybe not. Certainly not as much of a hellhole as 95 between Richmond and DC.  Lots of beautiful old motels and other roadside Americana, much of it just hanging on.