Sept 8 Day 7

More rain last night and into today, and it was pretty heavy at times. We awoke to radar images with nasty reds and yellows covering the Plymouth Massachusetts area. We learned that the radar looked pretty much the same all night last night. The rain and storms were very slow moving, and dumping tons of water in the area. There would certainly be no ride out to the Cape today, in fact, I wasn't sure there would be any riding at all today!

A call to the hotel front desk awarded us with a late checkout of 1:00 PM, and we needed every minute of that time. At 12:45 it was still raining pretty steadily, but the weather to the west was starting to clear, so we saddled up and left the hotel at 1:00 PM sharp.

Since we were not heading out onto the Cape, we had a pretty short ride for the day, taking us through Rhode Island to Milford Connecticut, about 3.5 hours away. Within a half hour of leaving the hotel and heading west, we were in clear skies, and the sun even poked out, allowing us to take off our rain gear for the remainder of the ride. What a difference 12 hours makes :)

We did knock off 2 more states in our quest for 48, Rhode Island...

and Connecticut.

While sitting in the hotel this morning waiting out the weather, we heard about flooding all over the east, including central Massachusetts, southern New York (Binghampton), New Jersey (where we are headed tomorrow), and all through central Pennsylvania.

In fact, nearly 100,000 people from New York to Maryland were ordered to flee the rising Susquehanna River on Thursday as the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee dumped more rain across the Northeast, closing major highways and socking areas still recovering from Hurricane Irene.

We passed this sign along the coastline of Connecticut, but there was no flooding in this area.

When we originally laid out this trip, we planned to pass through Delaware, and then head for home, passing through Hershey and Gettysburg PA. After a conversation with Lennie's niece Stacey, we decided to head to Washington DC to visit her for the weekend and skip Hershey and Gettysburg. This turned out to be a great decision, as Hershey got pounded with rain, here is a photo of the main entrance to the Hershey Park.

Here is another shot inside the park. The ride in the background is ironically called the Storm Runner. :)

A quick check of Hershey Park's website indicates that the park is closed today, as one might expect.

Tomorrow we plan to travel past New York city, Trenton NJ, and Philadelphia PA, on our way to Wilmington Delaware, hopefully we will have drier weather.

We covered 149 miles today traveling from Plymouth Massachusetts to Milford Connecticut, taking our trip total to 1476 miles. Below is a map of the route from today.