When your friend flies into town to experience a tractor parade for the first time, you expect you’ll spend the weekend laughing, eating ice cream and watching a few hundred tractors mosey through Callicoon. 

All of that happened. 

There were plenty of laughs, plenty more ice cream and plenty of tractors — 246 of them to be exact. 

What I didn’t expect, didn’t even realize until well after she’d packed up her suitcase and climbed into her rental car for the drive back to the airport, was that having a friend visit from out of town comes with benefits well beyond getting to see your friend.

It turns you into a tourist in your own corner of the world. 

It wasn’t in some grand, itinerary-and-guidebook way. We didn't do anything I couldn't have done on any given Saturday for the past four decades. 

That was the point. 

We took a leisurely drive down the road where I grew up, a road I've traveled literally thousands of times, though almost never at a speed that let me actually look at the sights on either side of the street. 

We drove down the national scenic byway that runs through our backyards and didn’t just slow down at the Hawk’s Nest. We actually stopped, put the car in park, got out and walked over to the stone wall to look out over the Delaware stretching for miles in either direction.

I can’t remember the last time I did that. 

And then, because we were already in Port Jervis and because why not, we drove back through Laurel Park Cemetery to find the spot where New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania meet.

There are two small monuments there, one placed on the spit of land back in 1882. It marks the northern end of New Jersey's border with Pennsylvania and the northwest end of its border with New York, right where the Neversink runs into the Delaware, and it has been sitting there for more than 140 years. 

I had never been.

So we stood on it. Three states at once, just for the heck of it.