Well thank you very much for the offer.
I have no idea where Fairfield is!!!
I do know where Somerset is, because Comcast told me I could pick up my new cable boxes in Port Murray, which I now know is 25 minutes northwest of my house, from which Somerset, and the Comcast office that actually had the boxes that would work on my system but for some reason the Comcast person who told me the move from Pa to NJ would be seamless and somehow didn't know this, is another 48 minutes back to the southeast, whereupon one needs to travel another 20 mins back to the northwest to get home.
Do you get the feeling I'm reaaaaaaaaaaaaaly irritated with Comcast. And that was before the internet went down because suddenly my modem didn't work with the NJ system, an issue the friendly Comcast customer service person didn't warn me about when she said the transition would be seamless.
You're very welcome.
Fairfield's in Northwest Essex County. Not that that's necessarily "close" to you (as I don't know exactly where YOU are, either). But New Yorkers tend to think of "Jersey" (we drop the "New," for some reason) as being pretty monolithic; so a trip to Jersey is a trip to Jersey.
See, as much as we curse the roads in Jersey, secretly we know that they're much better than the roads in New York. Even the jughandles make perfect sense when you think about it. So once we actually get to Jersey, it's usually pretty smooth sailing to get to a particular place in Jersey.
The hard part is actually getting to Jersey. Not that there's a shortage of ways to do it. It's just that they all stink. The GWB implies the Cross-Bronx Expressway and its legendary traffic jams, and taking the tunnels involve driving through Manhattan, which those of us in the "outer boroughs" are loath to do.
There are a few ways to avoid Manhattan, but they also stink. Taking the Goethals Bridge or the Outerbridge Crossing require taking the notorious BQE (which has been under continuous construction for 71 years) to get to the Verrazano Bridge (which requires a hefty toll), then taking a 50 / 50 chance of encountering epic traffic on the Staten Island Expressway. If you take the Outerbridge you also have to deal with NY/NJ 440, one of the world's most notorious speed traps. It is, however, a convenient way to get to the
Edison Diner, one of my very favorite Jersey Diners. (And since New Yorkers secretly know that Jersey Diners are the best diners in the world, that's saying something.)
There's also the Northern route, of course, which entails crossing the Hudson on the Tappan-Zee Bridge, which engineers believe could fall into the Hudson at any given moment. Seriously. Assuming it doesn't, it would get you to Rockland County NY, from whence entry into Jersey might not even be noticed were it not for the cheaper gas. But the Northern route takes you waaaay out of the way unless your destination is in Northern Bergen County, and it may require a few tolls depending on where in New York you're coming from. But I've used it when all the other ways were backed up.
In the end, those of us in New York tend to choose our routes to Jersey based primarily upon which route we predict will be least painful at a given moment in time. Where exactly we want to go in Jersey is a secondary consideration, because once we're in Jersey, we usually move pretty well. That's why we think of Jersey as being monolithic. Jersey is Jersey; and if someone calls us on the cell phone and asks where we are, "Somewhere in Jersey" is a perfectly acceptable and complete response. Jersey is Jersey.
Except for "South Jersey," which is really part of Pennsylvania.
The difficulty of getting to Jersey and our conception of it as monolithic is also why New Yorkers try to have at least two reasons for going to Jersey. It's such a pain in the neck to get there that we like to have multiple purposes for our trips and multiple destination in Jersey. And it really doesn't matter if those destinations are 50 miles away from each other, because we secretly don't mind driving in Jersey. It's getting to Jersey that we hate.
-Rich
