Saturday October 7th
In the morning, we got off to a lateish start. It was a grey, overcast day. Mary was working, and Charlene shouted me breakfast at a cafe which sold a lot of different kinds of pancakes, where she sometimes went. I ordered three pancakes, and bacon and egg, but I wasn’t prepared for the enormous size of the pancakes!
This was the last stop for the van before getting to Jersey City where I would return it, so I had to clear out everything except the bare essentials of what I would need for the three days in the RV park there. So I left the sleeping bag, food I hadn't used and other supplies. Also I had to leave some clothes there, some of which were still in the box that I’d taken to Phoenix, because I would be over my luggage allowance – I had flown over with 28kg, and I was taking a lot of flights from there before I went home, and some at least had only 23kg allowance, so my plan was to post some stuff back to myself.
I swept out as much of the accumulated dust as I could, and threw out some rubbish that had built up. I would be going to New Jersey with just three tins for dinner, some milk and oats for breakfast, 23kg of luggage, and otherwise only what had been issued to me in the van. It took quite a while to get all that done. I was rather sad to be dismantling my nice setup that had served me so well, in preparation for saying goodbye to the van, though it was also nice to look forward to staying in houses too.
Mary got home from work around 4, and drove us to a few scenic spots nearby in an area called the Blue Hills Reservation, including Houghton’s Pond, which was actually a lake, and had a small beach, and was surrounded by trees. After the colour in the Adirondacks, there was very little autumn colour in this area. Different areas seemed to lose their leaves at quite different times. There were a few people fishing in the pond, and a smaller pond with water lilies on it next door.
We visited an area on the reservation where there was a forest, which we thought would be good to go to the next day when there was more time, and hike there. There were small areas that did have beautiful autumn colour, which seemed to be along some kind of marsh. For dinner we went to Chick-Fil-A, a restaurant chain founded by a Christian, which doesn’t open on Sunday. I had been rather wanting to try it out, so it was nice to be able to eat there.
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