We are happy to present the pictures from Behind The Wheel 2000. After
much thinking and haggling we have finally decided to put the pictures
in the chronological order of the trip. That also means that we will hit
the states one by one. As we enter a state we will write about our feelings
on that state. Look for comments around the picture. There are a lot of
pictures - close to 350. Scanning and formatting all of them has been a
big time hogger. But we are doing our best. Also we are selecting the pictures
that we feel make the best sense and at the same time we are making sure
that we cover all the sites we have visited. We admit, some of the pics
might appear for purely selfish reasons: we want to put ourselves there
:-). Bear with us here.
New Jersey
New Jersey: our home state till now, is dearly called as The Garden
State. Well there is a reason for that - its one of the most landscaped
regions that we have seen. There are tons of gardens all around the place.
What do you do with all the money you earn in neighbouring New York City
? You pour it into your garden :-). Today NJ feels like a big mix of urban
neighbourhoods, farms and everything else you can think of. There is both
good and bad that you can think of on every turn here. As expected, the
closer you get to the cities the more traffic gridlocks you will enter
into. However one interesting thing about NJ is that you dont find many
sky scraper kind of downtown construction. There are quite a few quaint
lil' towns around here, which make for a very good evening walks. An under
estimated thing about NJ is the fall colours here - they are really brilliant.
Here on the left is a picture taken just the day before we started from
NJ. We are not smiling too much because of all the packing we had to do
the last couple of days before the trip :-). We did not travel in NJ much
except to drive out... In fact except the temple we did not do any site
seeing at all. So we head on...
We start off with the famed New York skyline. Interestingly
this skyline is best seen from the New Jersey side of the Hudson river
as this photo testifies !!
Both of us on the evening before we embarked on BTW
The rear of the CRV was decked with a poster that we prepared
Pennsylvania
PA (for Pennsylavania) calls itself as the Keystone State, presumably
because the keystone for the american union was laid here. PA also has
a huge diverse country with urban towns like Philadelphia and Pittsburg
which states within themselves. PA also has a pretty nice mix of mountains,
plains, farms and the like. Though we have visited a lot of places in PA
in the past, on this trip we visited just one. This was the Amish Farmhouse
An Amish spinning wheel for making cloth. Very much like the
one we know from India
and Museum located in Lancaster. Lancaster today is a pretty large town
with a huge population. However the farms around the town are still reminicent
of the amish way of living. The amish people live in an interesting world:
no dependency on electricity. Well there are folks in varying degrees of
One of the common features in Amish country is a horse drawn
buggy like the one in the picture
conformity with the basic Amish philosophies but its fun to read about
their life and how innovatively they use alternative forms of power. At
times it feels like their lifestyle is no different than what we have back
in India.
Deepa poses in front of a typical Amish barn.
If you drive around the Amish country probably you would see famrs dotted
with farms like these and the buggies carrying people around.
After we had a good lunch at the S.B.Elliot State Park in PA
Ohio
The country in Ohio continues to be similar to that in PA, however things
start getting less expensive :-). Some of OH is really very beautiful.
OH is called as the birthplace of aviation. We knew that the famed
Wright brothers lived here. We further learnt that Neil Armstrong the more
famous astronaut was from here !!
Sun rises on our tent - oh what an experience camping can be
!!
We get up to a dense fog and a beautiful day after a great camping
night
No wonder the openspace and all the scenery around has prompted people
here to be free and breathe the fresh air.
Unfortunately our stay at OH was also limited to certain places. We
visited the Seaworld near the city of Cleaveland. That was a nice experience
as we mentioned earlier.
No marks for spotting Deepa in this party city at SeaWorld
Shamu the huge whale at SeaWorld takes a jump out of water to
entertain people
The whale show and some of the rides were pretty cool. After seaworld
the other major site we visited was the coast of Lake Eirie. We visited
the Marblehead lighthouse which is a pretty site.
One of the prettiest lighthouses we have seen: The Marblehead
Lighthouse
Ajay strikes an awesome pose in front of the light house :-)
Ajay is trying to balance himself at the mystery point in Marblehead, OH
