Day 45 - From Urban Blight To Suburban Blight To Picturesque Pensylvania Farm Country

---

---

We're still on our backwards travel sequence where we sightsee in the morning and travel in the afternoon, but that should be straightened out by tomorrow. So we woke up this morning to a bright sunny day, with a forecast for partly cloudy to sunny with temperatures in the upper 80's - perfect traveling weather! After a quick breakfast in the hotel bistro, we packed up the bike and headed out on our 1.5 mile journey to the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, NJ.

While most of Edison's early inventions took place in Menlo Park, NJ, that facility is no longer there. It was bought by Henry Ford, and most of the buildings were dismantled and brought up to Dearborn, MI where they are on display as part of The Ford Museum which we saw when we visited there a little over 3 weeks ago. When Edison outgrew the Menlo park facility he moved to a much larger facility in West Orange, NJ just down the road. From this facility he invented the phonograph, the kinetoscope, and a bunch of newer inventions. He was working on synthetic rubber at this facility when he died at age 84. The park consists of about 12 of the original buildings around a courtyard that were used for most of the development. Other buildings in the local area were used for production. There is also a 39 room mansion just up the road where Edison lived with his family that can also be visited, but tickets are limited and issued on a first come first served basis.

We arrived at about 9:10 as i thought they opened at 9:00. When they weren't open, I checked the website and it said 10:00, but the sign out front said 9:30. We just hung out on a bench out front and played with our phones until the ranger let us in. Most of what is open for viewing is in 3 of the buildings: Main Lab, Chemistry Lab, and Pattern Shop. The Main lab was open now, the Chemistry Lab at 10:00, and the Pattern Lab at 1:00. Tickets for the mansion would be released at 12:30 for tours at 1:00. We knew we had a 4-5 hour ride ahead of us, so we were trying to get done by noon. That meant the pattern lab and the mansion were out. The pattern lab is a woodworking shop where the various wooden patterns were made. It would have been interesting, but it wasn't very big. As for the mansion,we had just been in Newport, RI a couple of days ago and we were both about "mansioned out". I'm sure it would have been interesting as it was also wired for electricity generated back at the Main Lab Powerplant, but we just couldn't wait around that long.

So after watching one of the four obligatory movies in the Visitors center and getting our passports stamped, we headed off to the Main Lab. This is a very large 3 story factory building. At one end is Edison's private library, two stories tall and setup more like and office and residence. The rest of the building is a research lab. We were expecting it to be setup like a museum with various artifacts on display, and there were some artifacts displayed, but the amazing part about this facility is that it is more like a time capsule. It is as if everyone just turned off their machine one day, stopped work and walked out of the building. Everything is completely intact, including inventory of materials in the stock room, and boxes and boxes of stuff in the archive storage. All the Heavy and Precision Machine Shops have all the equipment intact, still connected to the ceiling shafts with belts and pulleys, in this case run by large electric motors.

It was easy to picture what daily life must have been like for the workers here, and Edison himself was famous for working in this lab for about 80 hours per week all the way up to his death. In the top floor was the Music Room where research into recording techniques took place. I didn't realize that some string instruments didn't record very well, and they had an example of a specially designed violin and viola for use in recording. There were all kinds of various recording and playback speaker horns for different applications. The Precision Machine Shop even had examples of machines that were designed and built there used for mass producing flat recording disks.

There was a lot of Kinetoscope stuff too, and Edison was responsible for the invention of moving pictures. There was also a replica of this building called "The Black Maria" which was the first movie studio. It was called "The Black Maria" as it had black tar paper both inside and out, and was pivoted in the center with a round track on the outside so the entire building could be rotated to maintain the input from the sun. It was quite the contraption!

The top floor had displays of some of Edison's inventions that had taken place at this facility along with production copies over the years. But behind these displays were box after box on shelf after shelf of other items just too numerous to display. It is amazing that all this stuff has been saved, and that someone didn't just clear out the building and auction everything off for scrap!

When we finished with the Main Lab, we headed over to the Chemistry Lab where the ranger was giving a lecture about Edison's work with synthetic rubber. He was trying to invent a plant based rubber when soon after his death, someone else invented a petroleum based synthetic rubber. The Chemistry Lab still looked as it had looked many years ago, the same as the Main lab had looked. It was all really amazing!

By the time we finished with the Chemistry Lab, and we ended up having a conversation with the young Park Ranger who had given the lecture, about our motorcycle trip and National Parks in general, it was after 11:00. We made it back to the Visitors Center, watched another of the 12 minute movies, bought a t-shirt, and headed out to the bike by 11:30. Not bad, and the weather was still looking awesome!

We still had the Garmin set to avoid highways when we set out for Hershey, PA our next stop along the way. It looked like a 4 hour trip for about 185 miles, which meant with traffic and detours and road construction, we should be in Hershey by 5:00. Perfect! Getting out of West Orange, NJ turned out to be more difficult than expected, in fact, getting out of New Jersey was more difficult than expected. West Orange is just outside of Newark, and since we are avoiding highways, we ended up passing through some of the more unsavory parts of Newark. At least we assumed they were unsavory as they looked really bad! This was probably the worst urban blight that Jody and I had ever seen. The traffic was heavy, so we had lots of time in traffic just looking around. As we finally made it out of Newark, we just exchanged the urban blight for a more suburban blight. Instead of falling down and and abandoned urban buildings, we had falling down and abandoned houses and storefronts with practically one continuous strip mall. And of course, the roads were in terrible shape with lots and lots of potholes, and plenty of places where they just added a layer of road surface without raising the manhole covers, so if I drove into one, it would practically toss Jody off her seat!

As if the suburban blight outside of Newark was not bad enough, we now arrived in Trenton! Now Trenton's urban blight was much worse than Newark, to the point where we were feeling a little too exposed on an open motorcycle. Part of the reason we took this trip, and part of the reason we avoid the Interstates is that they tend to give a homogeneous view of the country. Riding through the secondary roads at least give us a taste of what some of these places are like. I don't want to pick on New Jersey, as it already has a bad reputation, but by now, we had seen enough of that state and were ready to leave it behind. I am sure there are some really nice places in New Jersey, but these are not those places! As we left Trenton behind us we turned onto Rt-29N which suddenly became the Delaware River Scenic Byway. The road suddenly became scenic, as promised. All the blight was behind us and we were on treelined streets following the Delaware River with Pennsylvania visible on the other side of the river. We passed where Washington famously crossed the Delaware, and a little further north crossed over i to Pennsylvania.

Once we crossed over into Pennsylvania, the scenery changed dramatically. Gone were any signs of congestion and traffic, instead it was just rolling hills farm country, some of the most picturesque farm country we had ever seen. After the depressing sights of the morning, Pennsylvania was such a welcome relief! The rest of the ride into Hershey was just wonderful, the roads were better and the scenery was fantastic to the point we could little remember what we saw earlier in the day. We arrived in Hershey, actually Manheim, a little town about a dozen miles outside Hershey, at 5:00 just as we had expected. There was a nice BBQ place right next door to the hotel, and the pulled pork was awesome!

There's lots to do around Hershey, but mostly we want to do the chocolate stuff, the car museum and maybe a cave. The 2 things that most people do are Hersheypark, a roller coaster amusement park that's just not our thing, and Amish Country Tours and buggy rides, that again are nice, but not really our thing. We'll see if we made the right choices tomorrow.

197.7 Miles Today

6930.3 Miles Total

5.579 Gallons Today

173.000 Gallons Total

---