My wife & I recently took a week-long trip thru Upstate NY & New England with multiple stops, resulting in quite a bit of new interstate (and backroad) mileage for me. Spent nights in Lake George NY, Springfield MA, Stowe VT, Portland ME, Bar Harbor ME, and finally Boston MA (mainly to break up the drive from Bar Harbor back to Maryland).
Some of the non-road highlights included rail-biking on an abandoned railroad near Hadley NY, a steamboat cruise on Lake George, multiple waterfall hikes near Stowe, doing the Mt. Washington Cog Railway (worked out perfectly that it was on the way from Stowe to Portland), checking out Portland Head Light, a sailing cruise out of Bar Harbor, and of course Acadia National Park. Meanwhile, road highlights included driving the Thruway (exits 15 to 24 & B1 to Mass) for my first time post-AET conversion and getting to check out the recently-reopened Plattekill Service Area (CFA had quite the line while BK & Starbucks were deserted), scenic views on I-91 & I-89 throughout VT, US 302 thru Crawford Notch & the White Mountains in general, the Cadillac Mountain Road (and the rest of the Acadia road network), the Maine Turnpike and their mainline toll plazas redone to include ORT (may have also clogged a toilet at the West Gardiner Service Plaza - oops), the Tobin & Zakim Bridges & O’Neill Tunnel in Boston, and finally a rare congestion-free trip thru Connecticut on I-84, I-91 & the Wilbur Cross/Merritt Parkways followed immediately by an equally-smooth trip over the Tappan Zee.
Touched on a few of the routes above, but the routes each travel day were:
-I-83 NB, US 30 EB, US 222 NB, I-78 EB, I-287 NB, I-87 NB to Lake George
-I-87 SB & I-90 EB to Springfield
-I-91 NB, I-89 NB, VT 100 NB to Stowe
-VT 100 NB, VT 15 EB, US 2 EB, I-91 SB, I-93 SB, US 302 EB, ME 113 SB, ME 25 EB, ME 112 EB, ME 114 SB, I-295 NB to Portland
-I-295 NB, I-95 NB, I-395 EB, US 1A EB, ME 3 EB to Bar Harbor
-ME 3 WB, US 1A WB, I-395 WB, I-95 SB, I-295 SB, Falmouth Spur WB, I-95 SB, US 1 SB, I-93 SB to Boston
-I-90 WB, I-84 WB, I-91 SB, CT 15 SB, I-287 WB/SB, I-78 WB, US 222 SB, US 30 WB, I-83 SB back to Maryland
Total tolls for the trip were $24 (would have been much higher if I had used the I-95 corridor from MD to NY) broken down as follows:
-$7.00 to MeTA
-$6.95 to NYSTA
-$6.80 to MassDOT
-$2.00 to NHDOT
-$1.25 to DRJTBC
It’s really something how much tolling technology has changed - every single toll point I passed was either AET or hybrid conventional/ORT. The only 2 times I had to pass thru a conventional lane was in order to access a rest area just beyond the toll plaza that can’t be accessed from the ORT lanes (I-295 SB for the West Gardiner Service Plaza & I-78 WB for the Pennsylvania Welcome Center).
