So we headed out from the Shipps' in timely
fashion, Planning on stopping at the Wonder
Seafood Restaurant in Edison, around the
thirdway point of our trip.

Everything was going okay except that it
started to rain, sometimes hard, and in the
midst of it we missed the Deleware Memorial
Bridge, which some may think hard to miss, but
it was gloomy out and we were talking, and next
thing we knew, we were headed for Philly. It's
pretty easy to fix, and so we bailed onto the
Commodore Barry bridge, which would have been no
great tragedy, as it entails a normally 10 min
detour, only they were doing something on the
bridge that entailed 45 extra minutes. By the
time we got to the Wonder Seafood Restaurant, we
were hungry, and lunch hour was about to close.
It looks, smells, and feels like a Hong Kong
restaurant, not much of a wonder, except that
it's in the wilds of downtown New Jersey. The
food is exactly what I'd expect. The service,
too, i.e., pretty bad. It took maybe 10-15 min
of the waiters ignoring us (it was lunchtime
for them) before the proprietor came and took
my order slip. The food came out in leisurely
fashion, with one of the waiters, probably the
junior one, sauntering periodically from his
lunch table (big round ones, one with the
waiterly-clad front of house presided over by
the proprietor guy and a cute girl who was
presumably his daughter, and another one nearer
the kitchen populated by kitcheny-looking folk
in stained whites) and picking up our food.

The cute girl being the only one with a good
grasp of Engliah, was the cashier and actually
smiled at us.

I've described the food in a post a day or two
ago, so we'll skip on to the rest of the trip,
which owing to another couple of accidents and
detours took an hour or more longer than it should.

Bonnie doesn't like the Garden State Parkway,
especially Newark, so I routed us around 278
toward the Tappan Zee. This should have been
smooth sailing, as it was well before rush
hour, but for whatever reasons we spent a near
eternity on that road before deciding to bail
at the 2/3 point, Nanuet, where the Garden Inn
beckoned and turned out to be really nice,
giving us a nice corner room and with happy
hour at $5 a glass for respectable red plonk
and $3 a Sam Adams. Very umamiish snacks,
peanuts with a few peas, cashews, and rice
crackers, all coated in a somewhat spicy grit
that was mostly MSG and onion powder.
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