Monday, September 21, 2009

Pennsylvania Turnpike

There is a portion of the old Pennsylvania Turnpike located in Bedford & Fulton Counties that can make an interesting afternoon visit. Entrance is by foot or on bicycle. Much of the highway remains, although the center strip & sides are grown up with grasses & small trees. A wide area, located @ the eastern end of this strip, leaves no reminder of the Howard Johnson Restaurant that served hungry travelers. Two tunnels bored thru the mountains back in 1942 remain, a short distance apart & open for passage. As I looked around I tried to imagine the many trips to my Grandmom's house on the turnpike. The roadway appears to be so narrow, the tunnels scare the daylight out of me just thinking we had to have passed tractor trailers in the confined areas (of course, I don't like the modern, well lit tunnels with 2 lanes in each direction). The current trip through the old tunnels can be cold & certainly dark, especially in the longer of the 2. If memory serves me correctly, they were poorly lit back in the day. It saddened me that the tunnels, inside & out, are decorated with graffiti. It was interesting to come upon a young photographer friend using the graffiti & ruin of the tunnels as a back drop for his models. Not my kind of photography, but his shots are excellent & the area serves as an appropriate background for his work.

I am sharing a few images from my day, that I felt turned out pretty well. Sorry, no pretty girls or cute drummers!

I found this tree facinating. How hard it must be holding on to life rooted on a bit of soil & rock.

The graffiti

1 comment:

~Brenda said...

Enjoyed your writing of how the turnpike once was; although I don’t have much recollection as we must not have traveled it much when I was a child.