![]() ![]() The Roy’s Fixin’s Bar at Alexander Hamilton, which is an overall fairly dingy and unlovable service area, has a sign taped to it that says “Salads are available at the front counter,” which is VICIOUSLY AGGRESSIVE and made both Martha and me feel truly bad about ourselves even though we had no plans to salad-lifehack this particular Roy’s Fixin’s Bar.Īlexander Hamilton has two positive attributes, which aren’t nearly enough to make up for the salad shaming. Roy Rogers is usually is my favorite rest stop option, because you can get an order of really very good curly fries and then go to Roy’s “Fixin’s Bar” and load up on a lot of iceberg lettuce and sliced tomato and banana peppers and make yourself a nice little ersatz salad. It’s not a rest stop, I’m just bragging.) Here, definitively, is the true ranking of New Jersey Turnpike rest stops. (Plus a quick afternoon detour to Six Flags, where the earlier rain meant we got to ride the tallest roller coaster in North America twice in a row without waiting in line. We drove the whole Turnpike from top to bottom and back again, stopping at every rest stop along the way. In the interest of journalistic rigor, I got up extra early on a recent rainy Thursday, picked up my friend Martha, and the two of us hit the road. corridor has a favorite Turnpike rest stop, but of course only one can be the actual best, which means a whole lot of people out there are wrong. The rest stops are all named after deceased individuals with some sort of connection to the state, which is a perfect representation of New Jersey pride: sort of pointless, but nevertheless endearing.Īny New Jerseyan, road trip aficionado, or habitué of the New York-to-D.C. These are run by “global restaurateur” HMSHost, the mega-operator behind food and retail concessions in 116 airports and 99 of what they describe as “motorway travel plazas,” 12 of which are the exclusive providers of food, gas, and bathroom facilities to the good people traversing the New Jersey Turnpike. The one thing the Turnpike really has going for it are its service areas. The signage is atrocious and the urban planning is deranged you are never going to take the right exit for Newark Airport, but that’s okay, because there are three other rapid-fire exits that will get you there. ![]() It’s 122 miles long, bisecting the state on the diagonal - the southwest terminus is just short of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, where the turnpike is a blandly bucolic four-lane highway edged with dense wall of trees by the time you reach the northeast terminus, at the George Washington Bridge, it’s morphed into an asphalt-tentacle beast, engorged, at its widest, to 12 lanes on four distinct roads, surrounded by oil refineries and other forms of outer-city industrial sprawl, all of them plaited with exits and sub-exits and interchanges. The New Jersey Turnpike, like so many things in New Jersey, is horrible, which is also why it’s magnificent. ![]()
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