What A Wonderful Day!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Note: Please forgive my mistake in naming yesterday’s blog. It should have been Wednesday, October 17, 2012. Doris’s birthday is on October 17 but I just had the wrong day assigned to it.
Also this is the blog for October 18 that I would have sent if I had internet service. Since I don’t I’ll send it on Friday, October 19 with that day’s blog.

What A Wonderful Day!

We were not in a hurry, but we were on the road by 9:10am. Well, not in a hurry if you were okay with your water tasting and smelling like rust. There’s even a sign hanging over the washers in the laundry room that your while cottons make become colored. There’s another sign in each of the toilet stalls announcing that the toilets are cleaned regularly. The stains in the toilets are because of the water. Yesterday the toilet in the trailer had rusty looking water in it. Get me out of here!

We were going to follow Rt. 6 east across the northern tier of the Pennsylvania counties: McKean, Potter and Tioga. It is a most colorful ride no matter when you take it.

Mt. Jewette is the home of the Kinzua Walkway. It has a graphic of the Walkway on the “Welcome to Mt. Jewette sign.

When I made the notes for this blog I wrote “M.J. has a mural on the side of a 2 story building in town.” I had wished that I was fast enough to get a picture of it. But reading some of the brochures that I picked up later in the day I learned that it is really a pictorial history of Mt. Jewette. How cool! And the colors were so vibrant.

Another thing about Mt. Jewette is that there is a 25 mph speed limit in town that everyone obeyed. I wonder if the town is a speed trap.

Another town that we rode through was Smethport. They, too, had signs. One of theirs was “Smethport - Home of the Wooly Willy.” Wooly bear caterpillars?  Again in another of the brochures that I picked up I learned that “Wooly Willy” is that toy that so many kids had. It’s a board with graphic filings inside a plastic bubble-like thing in the shape of a man’s head. You used a small magnet in the shape of a rod to move the filings around and drop them on the man’s head for hair or on his face for a beard. I never had one but maybe you did.

Then there was the town of “Eulalia.” Tom said that it means “good speech.” [This is based on my memory of Greek. Tom] But I am now believing that I read or heard somewhere that it is an Indian word. There is even a St. Eulalia Roman Catholic Church in town.

In Coudersport there was a most amazing thing. The owner of this house has such an imagination. He had a dead tree in front of his house. It was a huge tree. It was about 12” to 14” in diameter and taller than two stories high. The limbs were removed almost right up to the trunk and all of the bark was missing. It was just like a smooth, bumpy pole. The tree was shortened to two stories with a flat top. At the top of the pole was a replica of a nest. Standing on the side of the nest as if it were just alighting on the nest was a large carving of an eagle with its wings spread. What a neat sight.
At Denton Peak we were at the peak of the Allegheny Mountains at an elevation of 2424 feet.
Finally we arrived at Hills Creek State Park. We did the minimum of setting up camp and getting lunch and then headed out to the Pine Creek Gorge. As we left camp we saw one deciduous tree in the brightest orange “dress” in the middle of a group of very dark pine colored evergreens. What an eye-full!

We had to go through Wellsboro. This is a quaint little town. Some years ago it installed gas lights in the middle of the islands of grass on Main Street. Now that it is autumn there are corn stalks leaning against the gas lights with many pumpkins sitting around the base of each light standard.
At Leonard Harrison State Park, 1833 feet in elevation, it was sunny and breezy but no hats, gloves or hooded sweatshirts were needed. The mountains on either side of the gorge contained a mix of bare trees and vibrant colors. There were several large birds flying around in the gorge. Don’t know what they were. A man there said that there was a bald eagle in the trees below us and he was waiting with his camera for the eagle to take flight. But the eagle wasn’t going anywhere. So we left to get gas for our trip home tomorrow and to get set up in the trailer. At 3pm it was 64 degrees.

The trailer was full of “if…then…” statements. You know the kind of thing “if this happens…then we will do this.” As the afternoon and evening moved on a lot of those things were resolved. So now we are ready to spend the night and get up and move again tomorrow. This will be our last move until next year.

The one thing that we are anticipating is that there is supposed to be some wind with high wind gusts and some hard rain. The anticipation is not a happy one. Although we have a hard roof over our head I still remember leaky tents of years gone by. I’ll let you know what happens.