Jersey

We drove to New Jersey. And back! Via the Brooklyn Bridge, lower Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel. And lived to tell the tale. Do other people find driving in New York as confounding as I do? We seemed always just on the verge of making some horrible driving error -- a missed exit, the wrong lane change -- that would have led to disaster, but we never quite did. Indeed the NYC part of the trip went quite smoothly, all things considered. But when we exited the Holland Tunnel it seemed that we had gone the wrong way. We drove for miles on a crumbling divided highway through a lunar landscape of garbage and urban decay that did not have a single sign telling drivers what the road was. Concluding we were hopelessly lost, we took a special U-turn overpass that seemed designed for the hopelessly lost, and headed back the way we had come, determined to get it right. We passed the Holland Tunnel exit again and finally realized (since there was finally a sign) we were in fact, on the right road, now going the wrong direction. We had been right in the first place. Now we had to turn back again, not easy since we were again on a crumbling, divided higway and this time there were no special U-turn overpasses. The horror!
By some miracle, we retraced our path, found the proper highway, and all at once were in a new world, no longer a lunar landscape but suburban New Jersey, with subdivisions, shopping centers, flowering trees, office parks. Surreal after what we had been through. I felt like I was back in North Carolina. Sort of.
It seemed such a relief to get back to Brooklyn, however, where the parking gods smiled on us and we found a huge honkin' space, right in front of our apartment, on our first pass. And they don't clean the streets there until Friday!