A Trip to Long Island

 I don't get out Long Island way very often. It's not really that far from me, but it's convoluted to get to. As you know by now, my brother plans surprise adventures for us to go on and this past Sunday's was a visit to the American Armor Museum and the Long Island Welcome Center. The Armor museum (spoiler alert!) will be the next post. This chronicles the trip itself and the Welcome Center. New York State has opened a series of 11 Welcome Centers for each region of the state, and we are trying to get to all of them. (this will likely be the last for the year, there are 4 left to visit. We hope to hit at the very least two of them, and hopefully three. The fourth is in the Javits Center and is only open during events. We aren't ready to deal with that kind of crowd yet...and to be honest I was never really ever ready to deal with it, but...)

We took I-684 down and there is only one rest area, which I stopped at. Unfortunately there were no Historical markers. 

There's a lot of water in the area, this is one of the many reservoirs for NYC. 

We then got on to I-95

And we crossed over the Throg's Neck Bridge onto Long Island.

here you can see the Whitestone Bridge and the Manhattan skyline in the distance. We did not go to Manhattan on this trip.

After we got off the bridge we headed towards the Long Island Expressway, or LIE. We got stuck in some traffic due to an accident.

enough that it made the road red on the GPS.

And there it was. The white van you can barely see in front of the gray SUV is the vehicle that hit it, but I didn't get a shot of that. 

Cruising down the LIE.

After we got off and went to the Armor Museum, we got back on the LIE and visited the Long Island Welcome Center. 

We had a whale of a time.

Each of the Welcome Centers has a walk of fame and I have actually heard of 90% of them at this one. Dr. J of course has appeared on this blog before.

The ceiling was one of my favorite parts

each welcome center has a map of the Region and a small museum...

Billy Joel gold record

apple peeler

whiskey bottles

butter churn

assorted whale parts

An awesome advertising car! I want it! 

Lighthouse beacon bulb changer

scale model of a Curtiss P40B Warhawk, representative of the area's importance to airplane construction and design during WWII.

An overall shot of the museum. I was highly disappointed that there's not a SINGLE reference to the Islanders in the entire building. 

After we saw all there was and had lunch at the Welcome Center, we headed for home. There was a moondog in the sky. 

We saw police/fire lights and smoke, thinking we were coming up on another accident. 

Nope, it was a brush fire. That's a new one we haven't seen, hopefully they got it under control quickly. It was spread out over quite a distance. 

A lot of the trip home was spent heading towards the sun. I like this picture taken from under a bridge. 

Long Island Sound

Oddly enough the GPS routed us past the Throg's Neck, 

and over the Whitestone Bridge. I'm not sure why, because the Throg's Neck would have been much easier. 

Manhattan skyline again. 

Here you can see the Throg's Neck Bridge taken from the Whitestone bridge, You can also get a tiny, fraction of a second glimpse out to the open ocean down the Long Island Sound but I was not fast enough to get it on film. 

While I don't understand some of the choices the GPS makes, I sure am glad we have it! 

New Rochelle

Riding along with Amtrak

Two trains going opposite directions

We tried to stop at the only rest area heading north on 684 to see if there were any historical markers, but it was closed....

because of a car fire in the parking lot. Somebody had a very bad day, hope they got out in time. Sorry for the lousy picture but getting a clear photo at dusk from a moving car is not easy. 

It was dark by time we got home and we got to see a nice sunset.

It rained later that night and all the next day but the layered clouds were sure nice to look at while we were on our trip. 

These are all the new places I either went to or photo documented on our trip. Some I had been to before but didn't have photo documented (I-684) while most of Long Island was new to me, having never gone those places before. My previous extent of exploring Long Island was limited to the Freeport Rec Center and Nautical Mile, and Coney Island. 

Here are all the pictures (including all of the Walk of Fame members) from the trip to Long Island and the Welcome Center. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for the American Armor Museum.