While We Are Here........

I love a good road trip. But living in NYC has put a real crimp in any spontaneous decision to jump in a car and put the city in our rearview mirror. It now takes a little more planning and time constraints, as in renting a car in advance and committing to a specific timeframe for the journey. All that aside, we have managed to visit several sites over the last two years we likely would not have made a special trip from the Midwest to explore. Niagara Falls, Newport R.I., Philadelphia, and Gettysburg have been some of our destinations. This past weekend it was The Hamptons and Montauk on Long Island.

The trip planner (me) decided the best plan was to leave Friday morning, drive to the farthest point, spend the night, then work our way back to the city on Saturday. According to my electronic lap map (I am proficient with paper maps but when I can have a chap with an English accent directing my every turn over my iPad, well.....) the trip should take about three hours to get to Montauk. As with all well planned trips we reached our destination six hours later. Stopping at a funky beach town diner for lunch, a Carvel ice cream stop (a NY ice cream that in no way rivals Dairy Queen but my husband will argue differently), and bumper to bumper traffic through South Hampton, East Hampton, and Montauk made our trip more leisurely than we intended. It is hard to know where each hamlet, village, or burg ends and the next one begins. The foliage is all planted as a screen to keep properties private and you get the sense the only people on the island are those on the roads within your sight. Finally, the end of our day trip is a cul-de-sac with a lighthouse. An beautiful exclamation point on the end of Long Island.

The rest of the trip is pretty standard for an East Coast summer hot spot. Beautiful over-the-top beach houses, coves with boats, excuse me, yachts that rival the size of small islands, pretty people lunching outdoors, little shore towns with designer stores, and roadside crab shacks. The weather was perfect so we extended our second day to include a side trip to Oyster Bay, another quiet, picturesque shore town that is the final resting place of Teddy Roosevelt. It was hard to believe we were only 25 miles outside of New York City. 

Driving back into the city we both know these recent road trips have been very different than the long haul trips we tend to take in the Midwest. There it takes miles and miles for the scenery to change. The views are expansive, the towns are further apart, and the fast food calls to us from most every exit. But while we were here it's been nice to experience something different.......