A visit with our sponsors

Wednesday, September 18th.

We woke up today to more Fun With The Van. When we started it up to leave the campground it jumped a bit and the stopped. Deja vú.

But we've learned to play tough with this van. So we started it up again, jumped through the campground and got out on the highway. And it started to run smoothly again. We'd recharged the iBook the night before so we wrote it off as a low battery and a cold-starting engine and tried to forget that it just happened. There's always hope :)

We took the highway towards Trenton, NJ, to meet up with the guys at Bamnet, who sponsor our internet usage for this trip. We got to Hamilton Sq. right at noon, so we stopped at Stewart's Root Beer for lunch. We'd seen one of Stu's restaurants at Pt. Pleasant Beach and thought it sounded like just the place for us to have lunch. But it was closed! So when we got to Hamilton Sq. and discovered that it was a chain we were there. His "Pizza Burger" was an interesting idea, and quite good, and the frosty mug of homemade root beer was great.

After lunch we headed over to the Bamnet headquarters. The guys came out to greet us when we arrived and we pulled out the couch right away and got a picture of them all outside their office -- setting a new record for number of people on a couch picture :) We then got the tour of the office and saw the map that they have up on the wall to track our route across the country. We borrowed their hook-up and uploaded the latest changes to the page. And we talked about the trip so far and got lots of tips from them for our further trip. Rich from the office got the idea of putting some decorative shoe-polish advertising on the van, so he went about putting www.sofalogues.com and www.bamnet.com across the the rear side windows of the van! The design was definitely eye-catching...

We told them about how we thought it would be fun to paint the web address on the roof of the van. That way it wouldn't be visible from the street, but would be a cool effect whenever we went under overpasses or drove around under high-rise buildings in a city. We'd joked about doing it before, knowing that we wouldn't get it done. But then Mike from the Bamnet office offered the use of his driveway for the project! So we trailed him home from work that afternoon. He found all the stuff we needed in his garage; spray paint, paper, masking tape and a ladder. And we set about designing the letters to stencil on the roof. We managed to get "SOFALOGUES" on there in big fat letters, but then ran out of spray paint. Since it was getting late in the day we let that be fase 1 of the project and later picked up a new can of spray paint to continue the project another time. So we thanked Mike for all his help and headed back out on the road. The Bamnet guys turned out to be really great; not only are they sponsoring our internet time but have now also helped us out with a very useful campground directory, a new paint job on the van and lots of good tips for our trip!

We left Hamilton Sq. and headed out to a state park campground on the New Jersey coast just south of Staten Island. As our luck would have it, though, it was completely locked up for the night when we got there. We drove around for quite a while looking for another entrance or any info on after-hours registration. But to no avail. Heading on into New York that late at night was out of the question and wouldn't have gotten us anywhere anyhow. And there were no other campgrounds in the area. So we drove around for a while discussing what to do and then by coincidence pulled into a parking lot outside another 24-hour grocery store. So seeing no better alternative we decided to stay there for the night. There was a Dunkin' Donuts in the same shopping center where Dan had a bagel and some orange juice in place of the dinner we never had. And as is always the case with those places there were several cops in there. We were unsure of whether or not it was legal to sleep overnight in the parking lot so we couldn't really decide if it was a good or a bad thing to have cops coming in and out of there all night :)
But it all worked out fine...