Southeast MA – Reading PA
Thurs October 4, 2018
(~ 377 miles)

The Void endurance rally is held in the mid-Atlantic region, and is running for its thirteenth consecutive year in 2018. I’d been wanting to run it for the past two years, after hearing great things from other riders about the interesting themes and puzzles this event has used in the past, not to mention the comedic personality of the Rallymaster, Scott La Shier. Last year, a broken hand forced a late withdrawal before the start. Char and I hadn’t had a chance to go away for a vacation together this year, so we signed up together for our second two-up 24-hour rally. We’d had to abort our attempt at the 8-hour Team Lyle New England rally a couple weeks back with a sick dog, so we were both eager to get out on the road and away from daily life for a few days. Many of our riding friends from New England (and elsewhere) were also entered, so this promised to be a fun trip.

The Void uses a “spider start”, with a few prescribed cities serving as starting locations and all riders ending up at the same host hotel for the finish. Riders compete only against the other folks from their start location. Reading, PA was the closest start city for us, and well within distance for a day’s ride down. Because we were going right by them on our route south, I added in some stops for lighthouse bonus photos in Connecticut for the IBA Lighthouse Tour.

We left the house shortly before 09:00, allowing the Providence area rush to die down a bit. Our first stop was in charming Old Saybrook, CT. We crossed the causeway between peninsulas into the Fenwick neighborhood, apparently once home to Katherine Hepburn. We wound our way through a golf course on narrow lanes until we had an unobstructed (if distant) view over to Saybrook Breakwater Lighthouse. This lighthouse is on a series of license plates issued by the state. It has an interesting double-tiered walkway around the upper section, and barely survived the hurricane of ’38.

Just around the bend, Lynde Point Lighthouse came into view. The road leading to it is private, so we settled for a few shots from a distance.

We hopped back on I-95 for several more miles to New Haven, skirting the eastern shore of the harbor for a two-fer at Lighthouse Point Park. Being a weekday, there was no admittance fee so we rolled in and then through the open gate leading down to the point and the enclosed carousel. We got up close and personal with Five Mile Point Lighthouse and then continued to the very end of the point for a distant view of Southwest Ledge Lighthouse, out on a breakwater.

We stopped for fuel by the interstate, then a few more miles brought us to our next exit in Stratford. We skirted the small airport and another golf course to reach the end of the road and some Coast Guard property signs. Stratford Point Lighthouse, with a distinctive (if worn) paint job, guards the mouth of the Housatonic River.

We entered Bridgeport back by the interstate, which we re-joined for a mile to cross the Pequonnock River. We exited into a very industrial area that brought us out by Bridgeport State University and Seaside Park. Having scouted this location online, I knew exactly where we needed to park in order to get a somewhat distant view of the diminutive and grayish-colored Tongue Point Light, which occupies a nondescript point of land in an industrial complex.

On our way back out through the somewhat confusing maze of concrete, traffic lights, and railroad bridges to the highway, we noted some interesting older residential architecture in the tightly-spaced South End neighborhood, squeezed between the university, industrial sector and the interstate. Some well-kept and other not so much. After a mile or so on the interstate to get around Cedar Creek, we exited to cruise through the historic Black Rock section of Bridgeport back down to a nice view by the Yacht Club, of Long Island Sound.

Fayerweather Island Lighthouse was just offshore, on a spit of land at the tip of Seaside Park on the previous peninsula from where we’d just come. I thought the blocky shape was fairly odd at the time, but having visited over 100 lighthouses now, I know they come in all shapes and sizes. Only after getting home and seeing the photos on a large screen (and compared to online photos), did I realize that the lighthouse has a restoration scaffolding surrounding it at the moment, with only the lantern room visible above.

We turned back inland to circle around Ash Creek and enter into  Fairfield. We hugged the shoreline by the deserted beach lots until reaching Lighthouse Point. The tiny alley that the GPS wanted us to take looked very private, and more of a pedestrian right-of-way, but Char convinced me to nose our way down it for 100 yards or so next to residences, to where it ended at a beach pathway and we could see the distant Penfield Reef Lighthouse on its rocky little islet. The signage was a bit unclear on whether we were allowed to go any further for a clearer view, so we improvised to allow me to get the flag into a heavily zoomed shot.

All this lighthousing was whetting our appetites. I’d done an advance check for NER-recommended spots in the area and had a waypoint marked for Rawley’s Drive-in, just up the street in Fairfield.

Being famous, apparently, for their hot dogs, I ordered two of the chili-cheese variety while Char opted for a grilled cheese. The food was good, especially the onion rings, which melt in your mouth, and was washed down with a nice chocolate malt. Snappy Dogs still has my vote for best dog, though.

   

Rocket fuel consumed, we were now ready for the remaining blast down to Pennsylvania, via I-287, I-78, and US-222. Temps had been fairly comfortable today and there was a front moving through the northeast to cool things down a bit. We were lucky to thread the needle and miss the accompanying heavy precipitation to our north, which apparently dumped on several of our friends during their journey.

As we approached our destination, we agreed to locate someplace where we’d be able to obtain our starting dated business receipt (DBR) in the morning to mark the start of our rally. I guessed (correctly) that the hotel was actually in a suburb called Wyomissing, whereas our receipt needed to be addressed in Reading. We hit a local gas station to fill up, but the receipt was also in Wyomissing, so we continued to another station a few blocks away that was listed with a Reading address in Google. We ran into our friend Gerry there, also scouting for receipts and he confirmed this spot was a no-go as well.

A friendly local woman was standing on the curb and gave us some basic orientation as to where we were in relation to the town limits. On her advice, we headed off into West Reading, but then realized there was another gas station back about half a mile from our hotel that was almost certainly within city limits. After wading through a bit of local rush traffic, we made it there and confirmed the receipt address, as well as the time offset of the cash register compared to our cell phone time (~2 minutes off). Well, that used up about an hour!

Luckily, all we had to do tonight was enjoy dinner with our fellow rally participants at the Olive Garden near the hotel. After checking in and cleaning up, we headed over and had a decent meal with some great people, talking about the rally structure and hinting mischievously (with disinformation) about our plans for the following day.

 

After the pasta, we broke up and headed back across the street to the hotel, to repair to our respective rooms and make any last minute preparations for the start of the rally in the morning. I took a final look at our chosen route and then committed to it. We’d gleaned nothing further about the rally in talking to others, so we had all the intel we were going to get.