Frenchtown & Lambertville, New Jersey
State twenty-eight. A 3:45 a.m. alarm for a 6 a.m. flight, which I mention because I’ve been wanting to make a documentary series called 3:45 — about the people who are up at that hour and what they’re doing in the world while everyone else is asleep. Fishermen, bakers, nurses, overnight shift workers, people catching early flights for unclear reasons. The idea keeps circling. Some morning I’ll do something about it.
I landed, picked up a rental, and drove west toward the Delaware River. State twenty-eight. Halfway plus three.
New Jersey You Don’t Know
I’ll be honest about my prior relationship with New Jersey: highways, traffic, industrial skyline, the particular visual experience of being stuck in the approach corridor to somewhere else. I had never driven the western edge of the state along the Delaware River in early December with fog settling in and thirty deer materializing out of the tree line.
It’s a different state out there.
The drive from Frenchtown south through Stockton and into Lambertville runs along River Road, where the Delaware sits to your right and Pennsylvania sits just beyond it, and the road is narrow enough that the rock face occasionally requires you to make a decision about whose turn it is. The trees were bare — first week of December, that particular moment between fall and winter that I’ve always found somewhere between bleak and quietly beautiful — but the fog was doing something with the branches and the river light that made me stop the car twice without planning to.
Frenchtown first. Cute town, historic main street, a bakery that was open when I needed it to be, a hotel that didn’t open until noon and where I may or may not have been the only guest. The AI image I’d generated of Frenchtown bore almost no resemblance to the actual place, which is something I’ve learned to accept about AI travel imagery: it gives you a feeling, not a prediction. The actual Frenchtown had a converted gas station now selling antiques, a small business strip with real character, and a view down the main hill toward the river that I photographed in the last light.
The Fog Arrived Early
I’d been banking on fog in the morning. The weather app had suggested it. What happened instead was the fog started coming in by late afternoon, which is better — you get it in the full day’s worth of light instead of the narrow window before the sun burns it off.
I drove River Road in the fog with thirty deer in the fields beside the road, so many that I lost count, materializing out of the gray and then disappearing back into it. A statue of a cow appeared out of nowhere in the mist on someone’s property. I shot from the car without stopping, the action cam running, the fog doing what fog does to a December landscape of bare branches and still water — it makes everything look like a painting someone decided not to finish.
The Delaware in December, with fog rolling in and no one else on the road, is the version of New Jersey that nobody’s travel guide is leading with. It should be.
The Bridge at Night
I walked down to the bridge after dark, the Frenchtown-Uhlerstown Bridge connecting New Jersey to Pennsylvania across the Delaware. The fog had gotten thicker and the cars coming over from the Pennsylvania side were doing something I hadn’t expected — their headlight beams were catching the fog and the bridge structure and throwing moving shafts of light through the whole scene. Natural light show, car-powered, completely unrepeatable. I shot some clips. Whether they captured it properly is a question I’ll answer in the edit.
The town has a good feeling to it at night. The buildings on the main street have the proportions and density of something genuinely old, which they are. I walked until I got cold enough that warm trumped interesting, then went back to the room.
Lambertville Tomorrow
Lambertville came through the window on the afternoon drive — artist lofts, art galleries, a beautiful old church visible through the rain, more restaurants per block than a town that size probably needed. I kept going because the room wasn’t ready. I want to go back and actually stop.
Tomorrow: fog in the morning if the evening is any indication, then Lambertville properly, some galleries, a real lunch instead of a standing-at-the-bakery situation, and into Pennsylvania in the afternoon.
New Jersey. Who knew.
