Dutchess County Exploration: Route 44 and 55, and found cards!

 Yesterday my brother and I took our next trip in the Dutchess County Exploration project, this was covering Route 44 and Route 55. These were the last major east-west routes in the county we had not done yet, although this was actually one of the first trips I planned when coming up with the concept of the project last year. 

Route 44 is actually a US route, and runs through 4 states, but the scope of this trip is only the part of it in Dutchess County. Route 55 is a New York State route but merges with 44 for a good run before splitting off and going across the county to the south. Other than a very small section just west of Poughkeepsie, Route 55 was already pretty well covered in our last trip to the eastern part of the county. The Wikipedia links actually have a very good description of the roads. 

With this trip done, there is only one more major trip left in the project, and then we'll be picking out the areas we missed. I still have to write the posts for the first few trips, stay tuned for them! 

We started out by heading down Vassar Road, a trip I've made many, many times. 

Vassar College

Vassar again

Now on 55, I didn't post more from this part since I've already covered it. (I did take more, of course)

Now in Pawling, this cemetery dates to 1788.

Scenes from Pawling

We went out to Woodinville on Old Route 55, and this is pretty much the extent of it. It's a very small area that's entirely residential with oddly pitched roads. Honestly, I doubt I will ever go there again. 

Will always stop for a historical marker if possible. 

We circled back to Pawling because we saw a cool store we had to go to...

The Imperial Castle Toy store. It was a very cool place! Lots of toys from the 60s to current, some neat displays, and a very friendly owner. I'm mostly retired from action figure collecting, but we will definitely be going back there for sure. I did get some Starting Lineups and even some cards here- they are at the end of the post. 

A life size movie Harley statue

An 8-foot TIE fighter in the window

Back on the road, headed back towards 22. 55 merges with 22 in Pawling and the entirely of that has already been photographed on two previous trips. 

We looked for the small hamlet of South Mizzen Top, the most southeastern hamlet in Dutchess County. It's two houses on a deadend gravel road, which we elected not to go down. It neither showed up on the map nor even had one of the green signs stating the name of the area, which is what I try to use when the GPS doesn't show them. 

The only other thing in South Mizzen Top is this plaque on a rock detailing the history of the Oblong. 

The area of Quaker Hill Road and South Quaker Hill Road is very nice and picturesque. 

A very impressive house on South Quaker Hill Road

After we finished on South Quaker Hill Road, we had actually dipped into Putnam county, and to head north on Route 22 from that road is an almost 180 degree turn- so far, the sharpest turn we've encountered on any travels-I'm talking in my life, from Maine to Illinois, not just in Dutchess County! On the way back I spotted this 1970 El Camino, meaning if I saw nothing else on the day it would have been a great day!  

There were actually quite a few old cars out and about yesterday- I saw at least a dozen. 

Waiting to turn left onto Route 44 from 22 in Amenia, note our Edge's reflection. 

We stopped again at the Scenic Overlook in Amenia, but this time I brought my camera with 42x optical zoom and 170x digital zoom. The next group of pictures is from there. 

Back on the road now

Another cool old building, this one in Salt Point, NY

If I had the money I'd love to save these old buildings

The Wappinger Creek in Pleasant Valley

First time I've seen one of the new Corvettes up close

This new construction, still in progress, in in Poughkeepsie. I actually like this strip, it had character, unlike most new buildings. 

Now we are in the heart of the City of Poughkeepsie. 

While Poughkeepsie has some amazing architecture, it also has a drug and gang problem, and is considered more dangerous than even NYC. 

Here's the current map of what we've explored, the pink lines in multiple places are the ones I photo documented on this part of the trip...sort of. When  I drew in the red line with yellow border, I actually messed up and colored in Route 52, instead of Route 55. Route 52 should have been in green. 

I was able to add ten new places to the Places I've been project, only half of which showed up on the GPS. Surprisingly LaGrange does not show up on the GPS- only LaGrangeville. 

Now, the stuff I got at the Imperial Castle! He had a whole display of Starting Lineup figures, and I got my first Hockey figures there! When SLUs were common and we had regular card shows, I wasn't yet into hockey so I didn't get any. Now that I am into hockey, the line has been gone for about 20 years. 

Carey was the first one I actually picked up. 

Amazingly Joe Thornton is still in the league, signing a new deal with the Panthers 3 days ago! Too bad the figure predates the trademark beard...but at least here he's wearing pants! 

Although he had quite a few NBA figures, only one of them was not already in my collection, and that was Buck Williams from the original 1988 release. There were three Nets in that first release, and I didn't have any of them...until now! 

There weren't too many cards in the shop- it's a toy store, not a card store, after all. But on the counter he did have these, which I hadn't heard of. As you all know I'm a history nut so I was definitely interested and my brother treated me to a box. You get two cards per box- one taken from the margins of an actual historical document, and one a word or if you're exceptionally lucky, a signature actually written by the president. 

I did exceptionally well on the relic, pulling Dutchess County's only president so far in FDR! 

my handwritten word turned out to be kind of a let down in that it's a simple "a" and not a president I'm particularly fond of, but it could have been worse. I would have been genuinely unhappy if it was Andrew Jackson or Trump. The store owner told us that one of his customers pulled James Monroe and John Adams, which is really pretty amazing. 

The cards are very nicely made and they are now the only things in my collection that were actually held or written by any president, so that's still pretty cool! I wouldn't mind getting some more but they were a little on the expensive side, though I do feel like it was worth it. Sorry, my scanner is still not plugged in so only pictures for now. 

Since it was a smaller trip, I only took about 250 photos. You can see them on my website here: Route 44 & 55 Trip. Thanks for reading!

A plain white box can hold so many memories

 Anybody who's been in the card hobby for any length of time has encountered white boxes. They come in a variety of sizes and are the absolute best way to store cards- my entire collection is stored in them, and always will be. 

Most of them, however, are pretty nondescript. They all look a lot alike, for the most part. This one box, though...this one is different. 

Sorry for the blurriness, my camera refused to focus on it

I don't know exactly when I got this box, but I remember where. It was the Danbury Mall in Danbury, Connecticut, sometime in early 1996. I know it HAD to be then because I got it for the basketball card content, which I began collecting on Valentine's Day 1996. And I know it couldn't be any later because of what I did with it. 

All the dirt, all the dings and wear, all happened in my possession. That's highly unusual for me, as I take very good care of my things and always have. 

I used to take this box to school with me, every day, in the 6th grade, which was a horrible year for me....it's the year my health problems kicked in, that I'm still dealing with today. Every day was misery, and enduring so many tests that found nothing just made it worse. In fact, I would say that my ONLY good memories of 6th grade revolve around this box. During that year, I was one of many of my friends who was collecting, and the NBA was the #1 collecting topic among my friends.

I would trade my duplicates only even back then. In fact, I would often give them away, even inventing a guessing game where whichever of my friends who could guess closest to the card number got the card. 

Although I don't know whatever happened to all my collecting classmates, I'm the only one who never stopped collecting. The others stopped while we were still in school.

There are two ironies about this box. 

The first is that I bought it to get the NBA cards, but I don't know which cards it was since I've been collecting the Finest set for so long, and had most of them before I started tracking the dates, or I got them late enough that I have the dates and know they weren't added to my collection in 1996. However, since the contents of this box is the entirety of Finest baseball and football cards in my entire collection, I know for sure which cards in the two major sports I don't actively collect came from this box. 

Secondly, the reason this box ended up holding the memories, and was the one chosen to take to school every day, was almost surely because it had the writing on the top and side (not shown, it has 1995-96 Finest basketball written on it, and crossed out, before I got it) which means that I probably considered it damaged and thus expendable, if something happened to it at school! It essentially went from a cast-off to become one of the most cherished boxes in my collection. Until very recently (within the last 10 years) I was much more rigid about how the boxes I stored my collection in looked. Since my collection has grown exponentially since I returned to the NBA in 2012 and began collecting the NHL in 2017, I have become less picky and any box that is not stained and/or scuzzy is now likely to be reused for card storage. 

Here's a photo of it next to a clean box, to show the contrast.

Thanks for reading this most unusual post. 

Confirmation that I was right in being wrong (a typing project update)

 If you remember the other posts about this typing project, you may remember that I speculated that my counts were probably wrong. Well, as of today, I can eliminate the "probably". While I still have a ways to go, I've already exceeded how many cards I thought I had in one of the categories, and that turns out to be baseball. My records showed me that I had exactly 2736 baseball cards, and I've already typed in 2738 different...a small stack of 1989 Donruss put me over the "limit"

Although there don't appear to be any more in this 660 count box I'm currently typing, I still have more than a dozen 660 count boxes left to go. I highly doubt there won't be any more baseball cards among them, especially because I know for a fact there are some in my collection that have not been typed yet. So I KNOW there are more coming. 

Makes me wonder how far off I was totally...time will tell. 

A couple other thoughts from doing this: 

• With how fast the typing has been going, I'm more and more sure that this was the right decision. I'm also now pretty sure that I should have done this in the first place, but I can't go fix that now. 
• My 1993-94 Upper Deck NBA cards are, as a general rule, not in as good a condition as I remember them being. Almost every single one of them came to me second or more hand, I know it's not something I did, but still kind of frustrating. 
• I'm still averaging about 1000 cards a day being typed. 
• I will probably finish the typing this month. It's going faster than I thought it would. 
• Even with multiple days off (the trip from my last post? I didn't type for 3 days, it took me two to process the pictures and get myself back in typing mode) it's STILL going faster than I expected
• I realized I'm going to be able to figure out something I not only never knew before, but never even had a way to go about figuring out before. I debated between revealing it or not now and I'm going to- I'm going to know exactly how many people I have representing a team, for all three major sports that I collect (as well as football and baseball, which I don't actively collect, but still have into the 4 digits of for both)
• I discovered that I don't just zone out if I'm scanning the same set for a while....typing a big batch of the same set, or even the same sport, will also make me zone out. 
• I enjoy the boxes more when it's a mixture of everything. I believe all the remaining boxes are a mixture of topics.
• Some of these cards I have not looked at since I got them, so even though I "knew" I had them, I didn't really remember them all that well. That's much more prevalent with the hockey cards. After collecting the NBA so heavily for so long I am much more familiar with them, not just the sets' designs but the actual cards themselves. I find I still have to look up more than a few hockey cards, whereas with NBA I've only had to look up a couple, always inserts. 
• I discovered something I suspected but didn't fully know...the boxes don't hold as many cards as they say they do. I only counted two, a 900 counter which held 867, and a 500 counter that held 420 something, but I don't remember the exact number, didn't write it down. 

With how fast the typing project has been going, I expect this may be the last update I post until I finish stage 1. It's a three part project:

1. Typing the cards in
2. Proofreading and entering the dates I got the cards, if known
3. Using the info to figure out some fun statistical stuff on my collection.