I Drove in Rush Hour Traffic Across the George Washington Bridge Between NYC and New Jersey!

It was an experience I'll never forget -- driving I-95 between New York City and New Jersey, crossing the George Washington Bridge on our way to Sayreville, New Jersey. Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronxs was located to our left. It was harrowing and thrilling. Rows of semis driving just inches from each other as we jockeyed to avoid first one accident where a car "merged" right into the front wheel of an 18-wheeler and then a stalled semi after that.  The CB was alive with accents from the area and languages I couldn't easily identify. One trucker whose testosterone must have needed a release stated that he wasn't going to count the time he spent crawling along as on-duty time, that his company was going to have to pay for this, and bemoaned that he was supposed to be on his way to his sisters in "Joy-sey" where his "old lady" was waiting for him. I also found it surprising that there were a couple of  "peacemaker" truckers who cautioned everyone to just calm down and take it easy. That skewed my preconceptions of what truckers would be like in the "Big Apple.". Of course there was one trucker who took offense at being told what to do and proceeded to monopolize the airwaves with his brawdy singing of some song we won't delve into any deeper.

When we came up to the tollbooth where we were suppose to take a ticket that we would then give to the last tollbooth stop and pay for the privilege of using the bridge, we mistakenly got into the wrong lane and so when I arrived at the last stop I didn't have a ticket to present. I told the tollbooth attendant that we were "hicks" from Montana and he just looked at me like I was an alien from outer space - maybe to him it was the same difference. Oh, well, I smiled and said, "Have a Merry Christmas!"  I think I heard, "Baw, humbug!" as we drove out of sight.