Holy Highway Robbery, Batman

 

On Sunday, we broke camp and rolled on to New York City.  It is not without some apprehension that one sets sail for NYC in a 40 foot motor home towing a car behind it.  We are not actually in the city but are well within the metropolitan area.  We are camped at Croton Point Park, a Westchester County Park on the banks of the Hudson River, north of New York City and not too far from West Point.  Right outside the park is a train station that we will use for touring into the City.  Again, we traveled on a Sunday morning to try to avoid as much traffic as possible.  We also went through Pennsylvania in part to avoid all the tolls of I95 in New Jersey.  We hadn’t paid a single toll on this leg of our adventure until we got to the Hudson River.  We knew there would be a toll there at the Tappan Zee Bridge but we hadn’t investigated how much it would be.  I asked Gary to pass me the bundle of one dollar bills he carries in his pants pocket.  He passed me them AND the wallet.  As we were finishing the crossing and approaching the toll booth, there were signs – Cars $5.  Whew, big sigh of relief, it wasn’t going to be that bad.  We pulled up to the toll both.  The attendant counts the axles, one, two, three, four, five.  He then starts apologizing and we know we are in trouble.  He tells us he is going to have to charge us as if we were a commercial vehicle.  Remember that $32 we saved on admission fees back at the museum in Philadelphia, well it wasn’t quite enough.  The toll was $32.75.  There was a little consolation.  Later we checked and if we had rolled across the George Washington Bridge, the toll would have been $60.  Also, there is no toll going back west that bridge.  But there is just one problem with that, We will be driving on north and on up into Canada and re-entering in upstate NY and will never collect on the free trip going the other way.