A Carnival and Rain and The Real Housewives of New Jersey

So, I haven't written in a while.

That's because I haven't done much in a while, and I apologize for the half assed entry. If you live on the East Coast, you've probably been hit with rain. And not just a little rain. Days of rain. Noah get your Ark rain.

I went to college in upstate New York. I've had my fair share of shitty weather this year, but for some reason this rain has really hit me hard. People call me to go out, and I don't want to leave my house. All I want to do is curl up on my couch and watch The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

But, it's sort of getting better--both the rain and my disposition. Last Friday it was sort of nice, and my friends and I went to this thing called the Warren Expo. It's basically just a carnival.

I went with the kids that I ate lunch with senior year. Sharon ate with us too, but she was at her brother's graduation. When we got to the Expo, half of our group (Jerry and Dani) decided to go on the Gravitron--that scary looking thing that use centrifugal force to hold you to the side of the ride.

My friend, Iain, and I decided to opt out of the Gravitron, and went for a walk around the fairgrounds. All of a sudden, four cops went running by. There was a pause, and then every kid in our area who saw them took after them.

Iain smacked my shoulder, "Let's go!"

We ran after the kids who were running after a cop, someone knocked down the makeshift orange plastic fence that enclosed the carnival. It was a stampede of preteens, police, me, and Iain.

We passed some middle school girl with dyed blonde hair and ridiculous eye liner crying. Her friend laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder, "It's okay. It's okay. It's just your adrenaline rushing."

Two boys passed us and one shouted excitedly to the other, "Maybe someone's dead!"

Iain and I laughed at them. Part of me felt like I had finally matured because I was neither crying nor predicting someone's death at the edge of the fairgrounds. Then I remembered that I was chasing cops across a field to try and see what was going on with a bunch of middle schoolers. I guess maturity hasn't really hit me yet.

Eventually the crowd stopped, and up ahead of us the cops turned around, "It's nothing! It's nothing!"

Everyone started the slow walk back up to the carnival. I asked a girl I remembered vaguely from high school if she knew what was wrong, "Someone was smoking." Then her face became serious, "It might've been a joint."

So, that was that. This is rich, suburban New Jersey, folks. Where a flock of people hurdle themselves into the woods because someone "might" have been smoking a joint.

With this rain I feel like I'm completely trapped in the hellish parts of the suburbs. IE- inside. But eventually it'll get sunny again. I can stop wasting my time watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey and start exploring more places than the local carnival. New Jersey, the Garden State, the rain state, the state of people who "might" be smoking joints, is a state of endless weirdness. And I still plan on seeing as much of that as I can.

Blairsden Lake

The day after the Talamini Road experience, Charlie decided to show me a road where there were the "13 bumps" in Bernardsville. The legend of the 13 bumps is that, supposedly, during the (Jersey?) Witch Trials, 13 witches were murdered and eventually their graves were paved over.

There's a 13 bumps road in Watchung, and I've been on that road multiple times. However, I had never been to the one in Bernardsville.

"I've only been there twice, and both times it was in the dark," Charlie told me, as we started to head towards Bernardsville in his car, Charlie's CDs coming through the speakers on the stereo.

"Do you know the name of the road?"

"No, but I know what it looks like."

"Do you know the name of the road the 13 bumps is off of?"

"No, but I know what it looks like."

This ended up being a problem, because things look very different in the daytime than they do in the nighttime.

We headed through the center of town and then up Clairmont Street until we hit some ritzy road in the middle of the woods where there were mansions on huge pieces of property--overlooking fields and farms and forests.

We drove up that road until we got to the end of it when Charlie said, "I think we went up the wrong road. But look at this house." He pointed out his window to a gigantic house at the end of the street. "It looks like a resort."

I scoffed, "We should show up here sometime with suitcases and tell the owners we're here for our spa weekend."

We got back to the center of town and then started driving down Route 202.

"I'm certain that it's going to be off of this road on our right," Charlie told me.

"You're certain?" I said doubtfully.

"I'm somewhat, very certain, yes."

We then proceeded to turn down every side street to our right, and went the wrong way down a one way street, and still we didn't come across any 13 bumps.

Finally, we gave up. I called my dad and asked him to give me directions to this lake and that sat underneath an old mansion called Blairsden. It was a nunnery at one point, and my parents took me up to the property once when I was younger because it's supposedly haunted. Weird NJ and local Bernardsville lore are all over that story. My dad tripped some alarm in the parking lot, so we had to leave. I was about nine or ten and found this whole tripping-the-alarm-business to be really, really exciting. It was the beginning of my adventures, I guess.

The lake that surrounds Blairsden is located, conveniently enough on Lake Road off of Route 202. It's gorgeous and eerie. The road that follows is so slim that it's hard for two cars to fit by. There's really no spot to park and look at the lake, and you can barely see it sometimes through the trees and bushes that line the side of the road. But when you do manage to poke through the trees and get a glimpse, the view is fantastic.

On our way back from the lake, a downpour started. You could see the drops flood into the lake and the paling sky made the whole trip even more spooky.

We never made it up to Blairsden though. The rain was too bad to keep driving around. Maybe that's for the next adventure. And maybe we can complete the investigation without tripping any alarm systems.

Talamini Road, Bridgewater

Weird New Jersey gives very specific details of what you're supposed to do when driving on Talamini Road in Bridgewater:
1. Turn off your music and your air conditioner
2. Sit on the driver's side of the car
3. Drive West on the road, away from Route 202
4. Go 35 miles per hour



And then, from the depths of... well, wherever, you're supposed to hear a moan.

Rumor is that someone died on that road, hit by a speeding car. Weird New Jersey found no records of this, but when the reporters went, they did hear this mysterious moan.

I decided this would be my next adventure. A few days ago, Sharon, my friend Kristina, and I decided to check out an abandoned high school in Madison. We couldn't find it, however, and ended up going bowling instead, which was fun, but not really blog worthy.

I told Sharon I wanted to go to Talamini Road, and my friend Charlie texted me later that afternoon, asking me to hang out, so he agreed to go on the adventure with us.

Over the years, Charlie has been one of my favorite adventuring partners. We've gone to a lot of really cool places together--waterfalls, abandoned houses, abandoned barns, and a laundry list of local punk and ska shows when we were younger and when Jersey had more venues.

However, we had never been to Talamini Road before. We left from Charlie's house, since he lives closer, in his mom's car (since it's a little nicer than either his car or my car).

"Pick a CD," He said, handing me a huge binder. I saw one that said "Gypsy Night" on it, and shoved it into the disk player. When I was a sophomore and/or junior (my four years of high school have started to run together) we had a "gypsy night" where a few of us got dressed up like gypsies and had our more musically inclined friends play their instruments for us by a fire. We roasted marshmellows and ate homecooked vegetarian food.

The soundtrack to this evening had a bunch of gypsy-esq music--from Tibet and the Ukraine and, well, the United States--and the ocassional spoken-word song.


Just as we turned onto a dark road in Bridgewater, a spoken-word song by the band 1905 came over the speakers.

Sharon moved to a different seat in the car, shifting towards the passenger's side in the back seat, "I don't want to be on the driver's side anymore."


"Alright, we're not on the road yet, though," I said to her, craning my neck to see her.

"Oh," She laughed. "I heard the guy talking in the song and I thought it was the moan."

A few minutes later, though, we came to Talamini Road.

When we drove down it the first time, we didn't hear anything, but we were going in the wrong direction. We got to the end of the road, and then Sharon and I switched seats so I could be on the driver's side in the back.

A car came up behind us and saw Sharon and I running to different seats. They pulled up next to us and a young boy poked his head out of the window, "Are you guys okay?"

"Yeah, we're fine," I said. And because I felt like I had to explain why Sharon and I were switching seats I continued, "We just had to change seat... cause of... motion sickness."

The boy nodded, looking a little confused, and they drove off. I rolled my eyes at myself. Motion sickness? Really?

"I can't believe they asked us if we were okay," Charlie said.

"It was so... nice."

"And so not something that happens in Jersey."

We turned off the radio and the air conditioner in Charlie's car. We kept the windows rolled down, set the cruise control to 35, and started down the road.

All of a sudden around a curve, we heard a weird vibrating noise. Sharon, who wasn't supposed to be able to hear the moan because of where she was sitting, turned around.

"Did-" I started, but then kept quiet incase that wasn't the moan. But when we got to the end of the street, I hadn't heard anything except the strange vibration.

"Did you guys hear anything?" Charlie asked.

"When I started to talk, I thought I heard something," I said.

Sharon turned around, "I heard that too."

"Yeah, so did I," Charlie agreed.

Sharon went on, "It wasn't really a moan though. It just sounded like a note." She demonstrated, making a monotone sound with her voice. "It sounded like bagpipes."

That started an endless line of jokes about The Bagpipes of Talamini Road.

We decided to try it again, but the next time we didn't hear anything. On the way back, Sharon and I switched seats again.

A few minutes later she said, "Did I leave my purse up in the front?" I handed it to her. She scoffed, "I'm glad it was up there--I got worried the Bagpipe Ghost had stolen it."

New Jersey is so full of legends that even hearing a bagpipe sound when you're supposed to hear a moan is amazing, because at least we actually heard something. Half of the time legends are 100% made up. At least this one was only 50% made up; although, I'm no scientist, but I'm sure physics could explain why we heard a weird sound going around a bend at a very specific speed in a car...