This Week's Sunday Drive was a cruise along “The National Highway” US Route 40 in Pennsylvania
For one weekend every May it becomes one long garage sale, spanning the length of the entire state. I envisioned people stopping at one house and buying some scratched 45’s or something and driving a few miles to another house and dropping them off.
Scads of bikers, hot rodders, home made sausage and bar b que stands and brightly colored port a potties gave the stretch of US Route 40 I drove from Washington to Uniontown PA the feeling of a street fair with cars rolling along at 60 mph through the center of it!
I was kind of anonymous through it all as I was driving this week’s Drivetime Road Test vehicle, a 2014 Ford Escape which actually may have been the perfect car for the journey. If I had taken the Corvette, and found that magic musty couch I have been looking for, where would I have put it? The Escape allowed me to cruise in comfort and fit a few items I didn’t need in the back.
In the old days…like the real old days…like the 1800’s, US 40 was known as the Cumberland Pike and of course as this was one of the first major east-west roads in a young America good old Yankee ingenuity came up with the Toll House. Pictured is the Searights Toll House which neither took EZ Pass or gave out those delicious cookies!
It is fun to roll up and down 40 and see the remains of old gas stations, motels and road houses and get a good glimpse of how America traveled before the Eisenhower Interstate System was complete and every town had a “Mom’s Cooking” or “Eat at Joe’s” as opposed to some fast food drive through death at every exit.
That’s this week’s Sunday Drive.
