Stittsville to Goshen Indiana

The day started when I set my alarm last night: depart at 7, need to wake at six.  Found the right buttons on alarm, remembered the 6am and gave myself an hour's preparation for final packing etc.  Notice the slight discrepancy?  The alarm broke its silence at 5am, I was showered and making coffee  at 5:30 when Joan mentioned that it was only 5:30, why did you get up so early, you're only leaving at the 7am crack-of-dawn...

Blair showed up at 7, we stuffed his car some more, and we were off for our adventure.

Traffic was reasonably heavy and quick enough, but we were second guessing Carmen who wanted us to drive through Toronto, then Sarnia.  We opted to cross over at the 1000 Islands Bridge and headed west after Syracuse.  That interstate has become a toll road now and Ny, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana flew by as the tollbooth operators took our money...  Oh well, we saved more than that on the cost of gasoline.

Signs on the Interstate warned of long wait times ahead and suggested we take an alternate road.  We took the aptly named #80 ALT...  The state road was slower but quite interesting and we rejoined the Interstate about 70 miles further along where the traffic was moving smoothly.  As we neared the exit that would get us to Goshen, Carmen took the route less travelled that seemed an extra 5 or 10 miles longer.  Her route took us through beautiful Mennonite countryside, complete with large fields of horses with young ones, and neatly kept farms with white wooden fences. Many farms had wagons already hitched up, ready to go somewhere.  Even in Goshen, we saw parked carriages at Walmart and many other chain box stores.  These parking lots had hitching rails at a good distance from their front doors, and the asphalt near these hitching rails had well trod-on fertilizer...

Our motel has a 'non-smoking on the property' policy and these Mercedes owners happily set up chairs and a small table so they could smoke at leisure, technically off property...

Looking westward from our motel [to the right of the picture above] the clippety-clop got my attention as this small colourful group went down the town's main road. What fun to watch.

I'll try to learn from my early rise and correct my alarm clock so we can have a more civilized crack-of-dawn departure.