Daytona - Day 4 - Return Home

After I blogged about my last day in Florida and the terrible accident we witnessed that night I kind of moved the trip to the back of my mind, in a sense trying to forget about it.  But we did return home safe and it was an easy ride home so I might as well put up a few more pictures from our return.
We left Daytona Beach and rode most of the day running into a few really bad thunderstorms in South Carolina that left us soaked.  It was a warm day and I was riding with jeans, we just continued right through the first shower and they got soaked.  We stopped a few miles down the road, put our rain gear and continued stopping in Rocky Mt., North Carolina for the night.  About 580 miles was enough for the day.

After getting a motel room we went looking for food and found a homely place at the Gardner's restaurant.

The place had a great buffet full of food I had never even heard off. I started by filling my plate with pulled pork, field beans, squash, yams and corn but then I added things I had never heard of, like hush puppies, collard greens, mustard coleslaw, corn bread sticks and apple fried sticks, luckily I had Wayne with me to help me decipher the ingredients.  I am always ready to try anything and I did, I must say, southern cuisine is really good, everything was so tasteful, my goodness, I was stuffed.

I also have a very sweet tooth, for dessert I had apple cobbler and papaya, a fruit I used to eat almost every week in my native country of Mozambique.

A sign inside the restaurant

The next day we continued north bypassing the Washington DC area and crossing various bridges in Virginia  and Maryland.  We were stopped for a while on the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial bridge in Maryland because of repairs, gave us a chance to get off the bikes and chat a little, it was again a beautiful day with a clear blue sky.

My signature shot on the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial bridge in Maryland.

A Bridge to Cross the Chesapeake. . .

Marylanders originally had to rely on boats to cross the Chesapeake Bay to and from the Eastern Shore. But as the population grew and automobiles became a more popular means of transportation, people began to call for a bridge that would cross the Chesapeake.......
Read more here

The next big bridge we crossed was over the Delaware River into New Jersey.  There are no tolls on the way north but we had already paid $4 on the way south a few days earlier.

The Delaware Memorial Bridge is a set of twin suspension bridges crossing the Delaware River. The toll bridges carry Interstate 295 and U.S. Route 40 between Delaware and New Jersey.
Read more here.

We enter New Jersey and start paying as soon as we enter the NJ Turnpike.  You can't travel across NJ without paying tolls and they are not cheap.  From the bridge to exit 7A, the exit I take to get home is $4.60 but if you travel the entire length from the Delaware Memorial Bridge to the George Washington Bridge crossing into NY you end up paying $13.85.

I arrive home safe and tired having covered 2468.9 miles on this entire trip.  On my last tank of gas I averaged 47.7 miles per gallon, must have been because of the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike which kept the average speed low.