Travels, Return to New York, 2009

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Instead of taking the Taconic from there, I took the back roads that I would take on snowy days. The Taconic could get really awful if we got six inches or more of snow (especially if it came during the work day), so I would take back roads (shown here and below) from just across the Yorktown lab to cross the Croton reservoir. I really enjoyed driving those roads (there were three routes, now just one) in the snow, it was so peaceful and beautiful with virtually no traffic, unlike the Taconic which could be a madhouse with cars slipping and sliding around going up the otherwise very pretty hills. Below is the gatehouse which you pass on the sole remaining route to the bridge (the other two routes came along the shore of the reservoir from the other direction and have been blocked, probably for security reasons). The reservoir was built around 1900 with a gatehouse to control the flow of the two aqueducts which carry most of the water to NYC. As time passed they stopped using the gates at all for fear they would break and seal the aqueducts. They built the new gatehouse about ten years ago. It was a big deal and great fun to watch under construction. In the background beyond the gatehouse is one of the two bridges across the reservoir for the Taconic.	=0=
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Once you pass the gatehouse you turn left (as the other shore roads have barriers across them) and see the view above. The backroads to get home after the bridge are more normal roads like you see throughout Yorktown like that shown here. Northern Westchester really is beautiful. Once you got up to Rt 202 in Yorktown, the Taconic went from being a nice wide freeway with three lanes in each direction to being 2 narrow lanes. That made the last five miles or so of my commute as cars went just as fast on the narrow section even though the cars were much closer together and with hills and turns restricting the visiblity. However, they extended the nice wide section all the way up to Route 6 (shown below). Also below is the narrow section which is on the way up to Barbara's house and job (she made the commute on that narrow section of the Taconic for many years).	=0=
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This is an example of how there are sections of the old Taconic which have no shoulder and, when you are going around a bend, with really awful visibility. Some of the old 'clover leafs' have stop signs at the entrance and no merge lane. Really hazardous, but the Taconic was built at public works project during the depression and they hadn't learned how to build safe high speed highways then.	=0=