Gravity Hill Day

On a beautiful Sunday morning, Mac and I decided to get going early and do a little hiking and organic farmstand shopping. We were planning to hike first, then shop, but we ended up driving past the farm on our meandering way to Washington Crossing State Park. The farm we went to was Gravity Hill Farm in Titusville, NJ. They have a great farmstand on Sundays with lots of seasonal options, so I loaded up on some of the last tomatoes of the season, peppers, greens and other goodies. We also took a little walk around the farm to say hello to the llamas, donkey and chickens. It was a beautiful fall day.

From looking at their website, I knew that the name of the farm came from a local phenomenon known as The Gravity Hill, where if you stop your car at a certain point, it's supposed to feel like you're being pushed uphill by an outside force. You can read more about the phenomenon and others like it here. This is the farm's downhill tractor logo on their weathervane:

So Mac and I wanted to try this thing out. I was out to be amazed, and Mac, ever the scientist, was out to prove it wrong. We were told by the folks at the farm that there was a big X and the word "Johnson" painted on the road where you had to stop. So we found the X and put our car there. We were facing slightly downhill and lo and behold when we put the car in neutral we ended rolling.......downhill. It was pretty anti-climactic. But I was convinced that we were doing it wrong, so we did a u-turn and tried again, and again. Only one time was I able to convince myself that we were rolling the wrong way, but Mac quickly pointed out the optical illusion that even though their was a hill rising in front of us, which looked higher than where we were, we were still facing down a small hill, which made the car roll toward the rising hill.

You can kind of see this illusion in the photo below. When we were parked on the X facing toward where Mac is standing, the car rolled forward, toward the little rise in the road. It made for an interesting morning and I'm glad we went out of our way to check (and double-check) on this interesting local legend.

After our shenanigans at the Gravity Hill, we decided to finally get a little hiking in before Mac had to go to the lab. We went to Washington Crossing State Park and followed a few of their marked trails. It was a super-sunny day, which allowed us to take this shadow photo of the two of us:

I was hoping for some more fall colors, but we were a little early for our area. But it was still a beautiful day to be walking through the woods:

This was actually the same day that my parents came up with the IKEA furniture and I went to the lecture by Carlo Petrini! What a busy day!