As a lifelong Jersey girl, I appreciate all that the great Garden State has to offer, and am not shy about extolling its virtues to naysayers. After all, we’ve got miles and miles of amazing beaches, forests, mountains and farmlands all within a couple of hours of one another. We’ve got Atlantic City, top-notch universities and two major cities to the north and south. What more could one ask for?
I found out the answer on a recent vacation. For reasons that won’t be discussed here, my husband and I decided to forgo flying back from Florida, and headed up the coast in our rental car. The impromptu road trip incorporated a stop in Myrtle Beach, S.C., to visit with family for a few days, then continued north to our Jersey home.
My husband was delighted when I volunteered to do the lion’s share of the driving. It made sense — my long-gone years of on-the-road hippie-dom saw me driving coast to coast several times when I wasn’t hitchhiking, and I even worked as a cab driver for a few years.
I sang along to the classic rock station (one type of music on which we can agree), intermittently chatting with him as he made his way in and out of consciousness. But his silence — and occasional snoring — didn’t bother me a bit. It was a pleasure watching the open highway unravel before us, with nary a car in sight. Sure, some areas held patches of what country folk might call congestion, but it was no sweat for me.
In fact, I found myself grinning when a driver in the next lane actually slowed up to let me in after seeing my blinker. I thought briefly of pinching myself to ensure that I wasn’t suffering from a case of highway hypnosis, but then I recalled being addressed as “ma’am” by the young man at the Georgia Peach farmstand a ways back. Really, people were exceedingly, almost disconcertingly, nice to us everywhere we went in the sweet and hospitable South, even if they were a bit taken aback by my husband’s Newark-bred affectations.
As we made our way up to Myrtle Beach, our family wasn’t the only familiarity we found. Aside from much greater diversity of food options (our stomachs, spoiled by fresh, organic vegetable juices and the like, were wrenching from the fried heaviness of pretty much everything on every menu), we found ourselves surrounded by many of our tri-state area brethren. In fact, the neighborhood in which hubby’s nephew lives is dubbed “Yankee Stadium” by locals.
Still, the courtesy and friendliness persisted, on the roads and in face-to-face interactions. We would barely darken the doorstep of a retail shop before receiving a warm welcome and sincere pleasantries from its proprietor or employees.
The closest we came to a road-rage incident was some good-natured racing with a couple of guys on crotch rocket motorcycles — hardly akin to the death-defying runins that we’ve witnessed closer to home.
But alas, like all good things, our vacation came to an end. And although there truly is no place like home, arriving there presented a bit of culture shock. Hubby was back in his element, zipping from lane to lane on the Parkway to navigate through a sea of drivers rushing to get somewhere, anywhere, while I nagged from the passenger seat for him to slow down. When a millisecond passed before our road-weary eyes noticed that a light had turned green, we got a long and angry honk from the driver behind us, which earned some well-deserved shouting (the content of which, we won’t discuss here) from the two of us.
Yes, we were home.
And as much as the peace we encountered there had me “Going to Carolina in My Mind,” in the words of James Taylor, a Facebook post from a friend who is a New Jersey transplant to North Carolina jarred me back to reality:
“Does everyone in the state of N.C. drive with their hazard lights on in the flipping rain??? Really!!!!! It’s freaking rain!!!!! Ugh.”
Perhaps the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line.