I brought the flu back with me.  I was back at work just a couple of days when I had to take a sick day.  My flu turned into bronchitis and lingered.  I stayed sick for nearly a month.  Lex got sick about two weeks after I did.  We would both get a little better and then get sick again.  Lex is still recovering from her latest bout of this bug, and  I still cough a bit at night and in the morning.  It’s much better than it was, though. I’m hoping we’re done being sick for this flu season.  I’ve missed more than enough work already.

Fall is definitely here.  Nighttime temperatures are starting to slip into the 40′s, and the leaves are beginning to turn.  That, of course, means it will soon be time to winterize.  I’m putting it off as long as I can, but November will soon be here.  Then there will be no denying the need to wrap the hose and weatherize the windows.  We’ve already turned the water heater over to electric, and I cleaned the furnace and vents.  We’ve had the furnace on a few times now, and I suppose it will kick on tonight, too.  Just today, I put the electric blanket on the bed, and two weeks ago, I swapped out the summer clothes for the winter ones.  The mornings call for a light jacket, and I’ve even worn a sweater once or twice. The saddest part of this time of year is how much propane we start to go through.  We managed three months on the propane we bought in Ohio.  Come the middle of winter, two 30-pound tanks won’t even last two weeks.

The owners of the campground in Northeastern PA where we spent a month and a half this past summer dropped us an e-mail letting us know they had a seasonal site available.  Their season begins the first of May and runs until the end of September, and they charge only about $1000 for those five months.  Given what we pay here at our site in Dundalk, that’s an amazing deal, so we put down our deposit right away.  Of course, we won’t be able to stay for the entire season.  We can probably drive up toward the end of May once my classes are over and then stay until mid-August when I have to be back at work.  I usually have a few meetings between the end of classes and the time our contract is up in mid-June, but I can always drive back for those meetings and stay with a friend for those days.  It’s a six-hour drive one way, so definitely not commutable.  Even with those trips, it’ll be well worth staying there.  Not only will we save on site rent, but we’ll be decidedly cooler, too.  Our A/C decided to break down on one of the last warm days, so before next summer, we’ll have to get that fixed.  The days do sometimes get warm enough in Corry that the A/C is necessary.

We’re back to thinking about moving into an apartment.  If we did that, then we could leave the camper in PA year round.  They charge very little to store rigs for seasonal campers, much less than the local storage places charge.  We’d save enough doing that to pay for the next season. So now I’m hoarding my pennies for first and last month’s rent somewhere.  I don’t relish the idea of apartment living again, but I think we’re about ready to give up fulltiming.The downside will be that we have to continue to pay for a place to live even when we’re not living there, something we haven’t had to do while living in the rig.

I keep wishing that I had the money to buy a little spot of land upon which I could park the camper.  We could live there while we had a little house built. Land here is so expensive and zoning restrictions so prohibitive that I doubt we’ll ever be in a position to fulfill that dream.  I would say screw this and go back to Texas where property can be had for much less and where RVs are more welcome, but, I’ve got my dream job here and would be profoundly stupid to give it up.

Meanwhile, the rig is nearly ten years old, and though we have a year and a half left on our warranty, we’re concerned about how much longer the Big Blue Beast will be roadworthy. As it is, we need new tires before we can drive her anywhere else.  A number of little things are needing fixing.  I’ve got three separate small leaks, all of them from drains, not fresh water.  Those will need fixing before things start to freeze.  So, leaks, the nearly-dead A/C, dry rotting tires, broken shades, the fried surround sound system — it’s starting to add up, so much so that it’s discouraging. Of course, some of this stuff is covered by the warranty.  But the tires and window shades are on me.

I have made one improvement to the place, though.  I bought another load of gravel and poured it down out front.  Then I bought a bunch of resin pavers and laid them over the gravel.  We now have a little “patio” that will drain rather than puddling up in a rain.  There hasn’t been a major storm since I put down the gravel, but I’m hoping this works.

While this has been a hairy couple of months, one good thing has been that I’ve been able to see a lot of my family.  While we were in Texas for the funeral, I stayed with my aunt, saw my cousins, and visited with my biological father.  My sister was in town last week, and now my aunt is here visiting another of my cousins in Pasadena.  We’re headed there tomorrow to have lunch with them.

Lex is working hard at her graduate studies.  After this semester, she’ll be only three classes away from finishing her degree.  I will be going back to school in the spring in hopes of getting all the credits I need to apply for promotion next fall.  Then there will be TWO grad students in the house.  Oh, boy.  Hope we can survive both of us procrastinating that much. I’m going to try and enjoy my last couple of months of freedom before school begins in January.

Now that the weather is cooling off, I’ve got the camping bug again.  Don’t know why I feel so compelled to camp in cold weather.  Seems like a bad idea, but I do rather enjoy it for some odd reason. I’ve also decided to take up hiking in earnest (as opposed to the rambling around the woods for a mile or so looking for a cache).  I have dreams of the Appalachian and North Country Trails — not the entirety of them, just sections.  First, I’ll work up to a couple of miles.  Then five.  Then an entire day’s hike.  The a two-day hike.  Once I’m comfortably hiking at least 8 miles a day, I’ll think about perhaps doing just the MD stretch of the AT.  It’s a long-term dream, but I think it may be achievable.  We shall see if I can stay motivated.

So Halloween is just around the corner.  I’ve got my pumpkin and am ready to carve a jack o’lantern and already have a costume lined up.  Wherever you may be, I hope your Halloween is sweet and scary.

The last few days in Corry were spent getting ready to head back.  I did laundry, finished off some geocaches that I’d been meaning to find, and started stowing things away.  The day before we left, however, we did something quite on impulse.  We talked our friend Gerry from Toronto into coming back home with us for a week so he could see Baltimore.  He took a bus to Buffalo on Friday the 12th, and Lex (who was off work that day) drove up and got him.  We discovered this was a much less expensive way for him to travel.  Had he flown across the border, the price of his plane ticket would have nearly tripled.  As it was, the bus to and from Buffalo plus the flight from Baltimore were a fraction of the price.  He spent Friday night with us and then rode back with us to Baltimore on Saturday.

The last night we were in Corry, there was a little bluegrass/country band that played in the pavilion at the RV park.  We went to see them and enjoyed the performance.  The group was The McIllvaines, a family from Tennessee.  The eldest daughter has a beautiful voice and is immensely talented.  Maybe she’ll be “discovered” one day.

We left Corry Saturday morning around 11 a.m.  The park owner guided Lex out of our spot, and he and another staff member, Shirley, waved at us as we left.  We were sorry to leave Harecreek Campground behind, but they made it clear that if we wanted a seasonal spot next year, they’d try to find us one.  We haven’t decided what we want to do about that just yet, but the idea is appealing.  Spending another summer in the cool climate of NW PA wouldn’t hurt our feelings any.  Of course, to park our rig year around, we’d have to live in a sticks-and-bricks place here in Baltimore.  I don’t know if such a move will happen this year or not.  If it does, we’ll almost have to park the rig at a year-round spot.  We wouldn’t be able to afford to travel all summer while still paying rent on a house or apartment back home.  Seasonal spots are less expensive both in terms of site rent and, obviously, fuel.  There’s only be the diesel to get the rig to the site. We could take the car with us and do all our driving with it, saving us even more on fuel.  It’s a very different way to RV, but it’s an option many choose if what they want is a home away from home rather than a home on the road.

The ride back was a bit cramped with three people and two dogs in the truck.  We managed, though, and arrived in Baltimore around 8 p.m., just as the sun was setting.  Naturally, Nosey Groundskeeper Chip was on hand to meet us.  Since it had been raining and Chip was lurking about, we couldn’t drive through the field and pull into our site (something that would have just taken a minute or two).  Instead, Lex had to spend half an hour manuevering the rig into place by backing it.  That’s just something we’re not very good at, mostly because I don’t have a good sense of spatial relations so have no idea how to direct Lex in the right way as she tries to determine which way to turn her wheels to get the RV to go where she wants it.  Ultimately, she did get it into the spot.  Gerry helped her much more than I ever do.

Chip had been there watching the entire time, and once I started to hook up the utilities, he stood over me and stared, as always.  I’d told him I could handle it on my own, but he just kept standing there.  He was waiting to turn on the water, and I knew this.  So, rather passive-aggressively, I hooked up everything else first and saved the water for last.  Took my time about it, too.  If he wanted to stand there and do nothing, I was happy to let him.  I got the sewer, electric, and cable hooked up, and we got the rig leveled.  Only then did I hook up the fresh water connection.  It took me about an hour to do all this, and there he stood, saying and doing nothing the entire time.  That man drives me insane.

The good news is that there were no neighbors here when we got home.  The rig belonging to the family that had been here most of last year was gone, and Chip said they weren’t expected to return.  We’re enjoying the privacy.  With those kids gone, we don’t have all the children in the neighborhood running around behind our rig.  This I do not miss.  To make sure they stay away this year, I bought and posted a couple of “keep out” signs, one on either end of the rig.  Hopefully, they get the idea and stay away.

The rig is slightly closer to the water than it was last year, just close enough that chip won’t be able to get his massive riding lawnmower behind it as in past years.  This is another bonus. If he wants to trim the weeds, he’ll have to do it with a push mower or weed whacker, and as he seems to do that less frequently, I doubt we’ll be seeing him as often.  Oh, my heart is breaking over that.  Not.

On the downside, they still haven’t added any gravel to the pad, so we’re still not likely to be able to pull out our rig in the event of a flood.  That and the area around our front steps still becomes a small lake whenever it rains.  I suppose we’ll have to smuggle in another load of gravel ourselves and put it down during the night like we did last fall.  It’s the only way to keep this place from being a mud pit half the year.

I also noticed that both our trash can and recycling bin went missing over the summer, presumably “adopted” by the neighbors in the house next door.  This meant I had to go to Home Depot the Sunday after we got home and buy new receptacles.  I got a better trash can and an actual recycling bin (as opposed to a makeshift Rubbermaid tub), and I bought big reflective letters and applied our street address to both!  Hopefully these won’t walk off.

It has felt good to get settled back into our familiar surroundings.  We’re enjoying our view of the creek and all its attendant wildlife once more.  We aren’t enjoying the mosquitoes, but they are a fact of life here. I’ve been so relieved to have my little car back, too.  I’ve missed having the little Kia Soul to drive around with its decent gas mileage and improved legroom (yes, that tiny car has more room inside than our big truck).  And it’s been great to see our friends and family again.

There’s been a lot of rain lately, so the ground is saturated.  We actually had a massive thunderstorm with hail roll through yesterday, bringing with it significant flash flooding around town.  Of course, there was half a foot of water standing right outside of the front door.  Thank goodness for galoshes.

We loved having Gerry visit.  He’s 6’8″ tall, and everyone we introduced him to asked where he was staying.  Well, he stayed right on our foldout sofa in the living room.  He had to lie diagonally on it in order to fit, but he says he was quite comfortable nonetheless and even claimed our sofabed was more comfortable than his bed at home.  He had plenty of headroom in the living room but just barely fit into the bathroom.  Showering was a misery for him, I think, since he had to duck a bit the entire time.  He managed, though, taking it all in stride. The dogs loved having him here, especially Ivy, who snuggled up to him as soon as he’d sit down.

Alexis at Morningstar Baptist Church

While he was here, we showed him around town, took him out to eat, took him shopping, and took him geocaching (of course).  On Saturday, we geocached all the way up through Delaware and into New Jersey, where we stopped to visit Alexis’ grandmother and cousins.  Turns out there was a cache just down the street from her grandmother’s house, across from the church her great-grandfather founded in the 1920s, Morningstar Baptist Church.  We took Alexis’ cousins with us so they could see what geocaching was all about.  Theyy were pretty amazed that people were hiding things in plain sight all around them.  I love introducing folks to the activity and watching them marvel over it.

Gerry with Mr. Peanut at Atlantic City

On the spur of the moment, we decided to drive out to Atlantic City, only an hour and a half away from Lex’s grandmother.  I’d never been before nor had Gerry.  We didn’t stay long since it was getting late and the dogs had been home alone for quite a while, but we were there long enough to play the slots at Bally’s, dip our toes in the ocean, and buy some salt water taffy at James’.  There was a cache along the boardwalk to boot!

The day in the car exhausted us, so much so that we were relieved when we woke up to the next day’s storms that kept us inside until late in the evening when we finally went out for dinner, some final caches, and some shopping before Gerry had to leave this morning.

I woke up today not feeling entirely well, so I’m working from home.  I think the go-go-go of the last week just wore me out.  I have a lot to do before school begins in a week and several meetings to attend, so this will probably be the last of my blog posts for a while.  To those who have been following our adventures this summer, I thank you for reading.  I’m sure the next time you hear from me, I’ll be prepping for winter in the RV or repairing something.  Who knows?  Until then, enjoy the final moments of summer.  Happy RVing!

Friday, July 22- Sunday, July 24

We drove up to Toronto, crossing into Canada at Buffalo’s Peace Bridge on Friday afternoon, arriving at our hotel around 10 p.m. or so.  We called up Lex’s friend, Gerry, to see if he was up to a late supper.  He was, so we met him at his apartment not far from our hotel and then walked a few blocks to a sushi restaurant.  I was in awe that Toronto’s subway stations are also small shopping malls, including grocery stores, restaurants, drugstores, and other specialty stores.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The sushi was quite yummy.  By the time we were done, it was late, so we headed back to the apartment that Gerry shares with his friend (and Alexis’ friend), Brennan, and Brennan’s brother, Chad and picked up our truck so we could return to the hotel.

In downtown Toronto

The next morning, we got up, had breakfast at Tim Horton’s and drove back to the boys’ apartment where we left the truck and walked toward the metro station.  On the way, we convinced the guys to give their first geocache a try.  They were immediately hooked, and we spent a good part of the day searching for other caches in downtown Toronto as we walked through the city.  And walk we did.  And walk.  And then we walked some more.  Periodically, we’d hop on the subway or take a streetcar, but mostly we walked.  Just a reminder:  I’m fat and out of shape.  I was tired of walking before we even got to the first subway station, but there were still eight more hours of walking ahead of us.  By the end of it, I had blisters on my blisters and was wiped out.

Storm clouds gather behind the CN Tower

We’d had a great time, though, stopping for lunch at Smoke’s Poutinerie and frozen yogurt at Blushberry (oh, God that was good).  We also got to see a number of Toronto landmarks like the old courthouse (which also happened to be a virtual cache) and the CN Tower as well as the stadium where the Blue Jays play.  As we were walking, storm clouds started to gather and then burst over us just a couple of blocks away from the Korean barbecue restaurant where we had dinner.  We ate in our soaked clothes.  I’ve never been in a cook-it-yourself joint, so found the whole thing quite novel and yummy.

At the end of the day, Brennan and his girlfriend Jenny went off on their own while we followed Gerry back to his apartment where Alexis and Gerry got online and played a little WoW while I snoozed on the sofa.  When they were done, Alexis and I went back to the hotel where we crashed and burned.

The next morning, we had a greatly overpriced breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel and then went to meet Gerry to go to an early showing of the final Harry Potter movie.  It was so good, the best of the series.  After the movie, we went downstairs to the Loblaw’s to pick up some digestive biscuits for our Canadian ex-pat friend, Corrine back in Baltimore.  That done, we headed to a nearby Asian fusion restaurant, Spring Rolls, and had a regular dim sum feast.  They just kept bringing plates of food.  It got discouraging after a while!  Fortunately, Gerry can put it away (he’s 6’9″ tall), so nothing went to waste.  We finally bid Toronto and Gerry adieu around 5 p.m. and headed for Niagara Falls.

Neither of us had ever been to the Falls, so we had a magnificent time.  We rode the Maid of the Mist, of course, took loads of pictures, browsed the gift store, and left the area just as it was getting dark.  We rolled back into Corry around 10 p.m.  We were both sad to see the weekend end.  We’d had a wonderful time with Gerry and Brennan, loved Toronto, and were awed by Niagara Falls, but the work week beckoned.

MJ and Lex aboard the Maid of the Mist

Monday, July 25 to Wednesday, July 27

Lex grudgingly got up for work the next morning while I went to pick up our pups which we had boarded all weekend at a kennel in Corry.  The dogs appeared unfazed though we had missed them terribly.  The cat seemed absolutely indifferent to our return, but she did seem upset that we brought those damned dogs back into the house. I think she was hoping for a life as an only pet.

In Susquehannock State Forest

We had just three more days in Corry, so I had to hurry up and finish my last Allegheny Geotrail county, Potter.  So on Tuesday, I drove the two hours to the first cache in that county and got down to work.  I’d heard rumors that Potter was the most challenging county.  I had steeled myself for the worst.  It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t awful, either.  One cache took me into a park that was having a huge archery competition, and they weren’t letting non-archers in the gate, so I had to park across the road and bushwhack into the cache which meant forging a stream and slogging through some muddy flats before climbing up a pretty steep hill to get to the actual trail.  I wasn’t going to let some gatekeeper stop me!  Turns out the competition wasn’t actually happening that day, so they could have let me walk down the trail the easy way, damn them!  Another cache took me up a trail, through a forest of ferns, and atop a ridge overlooking the valley below.  What a view! It was about a mile roundtrip which wasn’t bad.  It was just the grade that got me.  I managed to get all six caches, though, and made it back to Coudersport, the county seat, to pick up my county coin and the master coin.  I was so proud of myself !  It had taken me a whole month (not the three days that some folks claim it took them) to complete the entire Allegheny Geotrail, but I did it!  I figured I drove about 2,000 miles all told and hiked at least 25 miles to obtain 60 caches.

Alexis berry picking

Wednesday was our last day in Corry, and I wanted to go pick wild blueberries, so Alexis and I hopped into the truck and headed for a site in the Allegheny National Forest near one of the AGT caches where the blueberries were supposed to be plentiful.  The bushes were everywhere, but they had been picked over pretty well.  Had we come the week before, we might have gotten more.  Clearly the locals know the treasure to be found there.  We walked away with about a pint of berries.  I froze them and hope to have Alexis make us some wild blueberry muffins soon.

Thursday, July 28 to Sunday, July 31

The rest of Wednesday was spent breaking down the rig and getting ready to travel in the morning.  We needed to leave by 5 in the morning to reach our destination in Ohio by 10 a.m., so we hit the hay early, rising around 3 in the morning to get something to eat, stow the last of our gear, hitch up the rig, and pull out.  On the way to Wauseon, we had a couple of scary moments when the pigtail that connects the trailer brakes to the truck managed to unhook itself.  Both times we got safely off the road and reconnected the line.  We also hit a downpour while negotiating Cleveland’s rush-hour traffic.  Lex did a great job, though, and got us through it all.  We arrived at the fairgrounds in Warren a little later than we’d hoped, around 11 a.m. and discovered that the site I’d reserved was far too small for our rig, so we got to choose one in an area of the campground that was empty.  As Lex was backing the rig into the site (we hate back-ins), she cut the wheel a bit too sharply, and before I could shout out a warning, the back window of the rig was shattered by the nose of the rig.  Oops!  Fortunately, we were covered, and for a $50 deductible, Safelite came out and replaced the window in a matter of hours.

We spent the next couple of days enjoying Midwest Geobash at the Fulton County Fairgrounds in Wauseon.  There were vendors, games (we entered the treasure hunt and I played geobingo), and fellowship.  We decided that Midwest Geobash is decidedly more fun that Geowoodstock.  It has more of a party atmosphere.  There is one part of the grounds set aside for an all-night party, Area 51.  The first night there was a tinfoil hat contest, but I was late getting there.  By the time I arrived, everyone was pretty well plastered.

My tinfoil hat

We saw a few Maryland cachers that we recognized and met a lovely couple from Indiana who were new to caching.  They had lots of questions, and we were happy to answer them.  I continued trading my paracord bracelets (of which I’d made many) for pathtags and came away from the event with another fifty or so.  Lex bought us a gorgeous custom-made wooden box to store our tags, and we both walked away from the event with t-shirts, new geocoins, and lots of miscellaneous cache swag.

We made a run to nearby Toledo on Friday evening to see about picking up a new desk for Alexis at Office Depot.  While we were there, we grabbed a few caches, including one across the state line in Michigan.  I had found a bike for sale on Toledo’s Craigslist that I wanted to check out, so we met up with the seller after finding our caches.  I liked what I saw, so plunked down fifty bucks for an old beach cruiser.  I discovered that the seat post was loose, and all my efforts to try and tighten it were in vain.  Sadly, this meant I didn’t really get to ride my bike around the fairgrounds for the rest of the weekend like I hoped.  It would need repair first.

My "new" bike

Alexis was so taken with the idea of having her own bike, that we went to a Wal Mart in a town about ten miles away and picked up a ladies’ Schwinn hybrid bike for her.  She just loved it!  Neither of us has had a bike in years, and we’re looking forward to breaking them in.

Midwest Geobash wrapped up Saturday night, and on Sunday we hitched up the rig and left for Sunny’s Campground about fifteen minutes away where we were set to spend about 11 days while exploring the area.  We got there and found out we had no cell signal (AT&T) and none of our broadband modems were working, either (Verizon, Virgin Mobile, and Cricket).  The park’s wifi was useless.  This is a problem.  Lex had to get back to work on Monday, so she relies on a cell signal and Internet connection to do her job properly.  We had to think fast.  With no way to research local parks — we couldn’t call around or Google anything — we decided to go with what we knew.  Harecreek back in Corry, PA had working Internet, we got a cell signal there, the park was nice, and we liked the area.  So I called the park owner and asked him if he had room for us.  He did, so we headed back to Pennsylvania.  On one hand, it was disappointing because I’d hoped to go on a caching trip through Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, stopping to see Chicago on the way.  Well, that wasn’t going to happen, but at least we were returning to someplace cooler with less humidity.  The weather had been miserable the entire time we’d been in Wauseon.  We’d gotten spoiled in PA!

We got back to the campground in Corry around 10 p.m. Sunday night.  The owner met us and guided us into our spot.  We got unhitched, and Lex was driving the truck back around to the rear of the rig to park it when there was a horrible noise.  She’d run over one of the fire rings they use here in the park, and it had lodged itself between her front tire and the front bumper.  The fire rings are rims from semi trucks, so they are indestructible.  The bumper, however, didn’t fare so well.  This meant ANOTHER call to Geico, our second in three days.  Oh, boy.  There goes the safe driver discount.  In fairness to Alexis, it was pretty dark out here; I don’t think she saw the thing sitting there.  The damage seemed minimal, but I would have to take the truck to an adjuster in Erie on Wednesday to get an estimate.

Monday, August 1 to Thursday, August 4

The first day of August depresses me.  It means that I have to go back to work in just two weeks and our trip will soon be at an end, both reasons to be bummed.  So I spent most of Monday on the sofa, moving only to go take a nap in the bedroom when I developed a migraine.  I couldn’t have done much less.  Lex put her new desk together Monday night, though, so the day wasn’t a complete waste!

On Tuesday, I got up, went into town, dropped off our bikes at a local cycle shop.  Lex’s chain had come off and she wanted to make sure it was properly adjusted.  Wal Mart isn’t known for its expert bike assembly.  I really wanted my seat post fixed.  The shop owner said he’d try to get them done by Friday.  I hope he can manage it.  I want very much to go ride part of the Corry Junction Greenway Trail here in town.  It’s a rails-to-trail hike/bike trail, and the first part is paved and relatively level, so it’d be perfect for the two of us. Afterwards, I rented some videos, picked up some pizza for lunch, poked around town for a while, and came back to the campground where I watched movies most of the day, pausing to get up and take my wash over to the laundry room here in the park.  I posted a sign up hoping to get rid of Lex’s old desk, but we haven’t had any takers so far.  It’s in pretty good shape except for the wobbly keyboard tray.

Wednesday morning I drove to Erie to meet the adjuster.  The estimate amounted to $857.  Wow!  Considering how little damage there was, that’s a lot.  It’s a quick fix, apparently, with only one or two hours of labor.  The body shop where I met the adjuster was too busy and wouldn’t be able to get the truck done by the time we needed to leave the area, so I called around to another shop.  He told me to get the adjuster to fax over the estimate, and he’d get back to me.  Well, okay then.  I did that and then headed back towards Corry.

On the way, I saw an RV dealership and decided to stop in and look at some rigs.  Alexis and I are seriously considering trying to pay off this rig quickly (within the next year or so), get back into a sticks-and-bricks place, sell the rig, and buy something much smaller and easier to tow.  We talked about a truck camper as a possibility (loads in the bed of a truck instead of being pulled behind it), but neither of us had ever been in one.  Turns out the dealership had a few, and I took a look around.  I decided that without a slide, it wouldn’t really be doable for the two of us and the pets.  Even with the slide, it’d be a squeeze.  Of course, we’d only be traveling a few weeks a year instead of living in it year-round, but with so little floor space, I’m not sure what Otis would do with himself.  The sleeping area is a bit too high up for him to jump, so he’d always be underfoot.  I also looked at a couple of smaller (under 19 feet) travel trailers, and those seemed more our speed.  As we get closer to paying off the fifth wheel, we’ll have to look at more small travel trailers.  We’d liked to Heartland MPG quite a lot.  I think that’s the size we’ll need.

I got back into town, stopped at the CVS and picked up a prescription I had transferred here, and stopped by a local body shop, Corry Collision.  Turns out they could fit me in and could have the parts very quickly.  I decided to go with them.  While they work on the truck, I’ll probably take Corry’s lone cab to and from the campground.  He’ll probably take the truck in on Monday and it’ll be all shiny new and ready to roll that same day (knock wood).

Wednesday afternoon was grey and rainy, so I spent most of it watching yet more movies.  I really should start to work on my fall classes, but I’m absolutely unmotivated right now.  There’s just so much to be done that I can’t bring myself to begin.  I’ll have to suck it up and get to work soon, though.  School is coming, whether or not I’m ready.  Doing actual work means acknowledging that fact, though, and I’m in denial right now.

Now here it is 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, and I’ve accomplished precious little today other than figuring out my bills for the next month.  This trip is leaving me dead broke, and I won’t have money for dining out or going to the movies or any such luxuries for the next several weeks.  In fact, it’ll be all I can do to muster the cash to get us home.  Let’s pray nothing goes wrong on the way (knock wood again).  We can’t afford it!  I wrote out the rent check for our site in Dundalk today.  We only pay for part of the month in June and August and don’t pay at all in July.  Thank goodness.  Site rent is so expensive there that we wouldn’t be able to afford to travel if we had to pay even when we weren’t parked there.  We pay $800 a month in Dundalk for what we can get for less than $500 here (we get more here, actually, since there’s a pool, laundromat, dumpster, propane filling station, etc. here in the park).  There’s also no grumpy groundskeeper here.

We’re not looking forward to pulling back into our site in Dundalk because last year Creepy Groundskeeper Chip actually yelled at us when we pulled in through the field instead of backing in.  Next week, I’m calling the park manager and explaining that we will be pulling through the field again this year and that she should inform Chip since we have no desire to be yelled at again.  I’m also going to tell her about how he stands right over me and stares at me while I hook and unhook my utilities.  He doesn’t help and in fact will refuse if I ask him for help.  Frankly, I think he’s just there because he thinks we’re a couple of dumb broads who don’t know what we’re doing, and I think he looks down my shirt while he’s at it.  I’ll make sure Diane knows this last part, too.  I’m hoping to scare him away so he’ll leave us alone entirely.

Well, there’s more laundry to be done, trash to be taken out, dishes to be washed, a catbox to be cleaned, and dogs to be walked.  See how different this kind of travel is from the usual hotel room or resort?  The chores come right along with us.

Saturday, July 9

This was a day of Internet misery.  On the weekends, camper after camper rolls into this RV park, and everyone seems to bring at least one laptop along.  Then these folks all fire up their machines and jump on the already-feeble wifi network provided by the park.  Lex was trying to enjoy a day off of work by playing WoW, and I was trying to post final course grades. Well, neither was happening.  We spent most of the afternoon just wringing our hands, and Alexis kept peering out the window with our new binoculars (thank you, CCBC, for my five-year service award) at neighboring RVs to try and determine who was sucking up all the bandwidth.  Thank goodness for mirrored rear windows! Eventually, we both gave up and watched the Harry Potter marathon on TV while making paracord bracelets.  That was infinitely less frustrating.

Saturday evening was the RV park’s Mexican potluck.  Lex worked hard making her truly luscious homemade flour tortillas, and I made a King Ranch chicken casserole.  Well, apparently folks in these parts do not understand that a tortilla can be eaten all alone with no taco fillings.  Folks, it’s just a flat biscuit!  Get that into your heads.  I was so sad that no one took any, but I wasn’t letting them go to waste.  I brought them all home, and we snarfed them down over the next couple of days.  My casserole wasn’t done in time for the potluck, actually.  We didn’t leave enough time for me to bake it off before the thing started at 5:30, so we were stuck with a HUGE pan of the stuff.  I palmed half of it off on two of our park neighbors, and they loved it!  The one thing we took that was a real hit was a gallon jug of jamaica con limon, or hibiscus tea lemonade.  Folks are always a little skeptical at first, but once they get a swig of it, they’re hooked!

Sunday, July 10

We drove south to Titusville to ride the Oil Creek and Titusville Railroad, an excursion line that makes a 26-mile (three-hour) round trip from Titusville to Oil Creek State Park.  It’s an historical tour of the origins of the petroleum industry in Venango County.  It takes passengers past the Drake Well and the ancient Indian oil pits as well as the remnants of old boomtowns gone bust.  The vintage railway cars travel at a blazing 10 miles per hour.  It was my first time being on a “real” train (not counting subways or metro transit trains), and had it not been a comparatively sweltering day, I would have loved it.  The gentle rocking motion could have put me right to sleep, except that our tour guide was standing right next to us sharing local lore.  We sprang for first-class tickets aboard the Wabash Cannonball passenger car.  For our extra dollars we got cloth-covered cushy seats that reclined, very welcome bottles of cold water. and handheld fans.  We also got to board first and were the only ones who had a live tour guide rather than an audio recording.  I must say, I’ve never ridden first class before, and now I see why folks do it!  So luxe!  Well, except for the no air-conditioning part.

Aboard the OC&T Railroad

We were allowed to get up and walk around the train, visit the concession car, mail postcards via the only remaining active onboard railway post office in the country, and walk out to the gondola car in the rear of the train.  That is an open-air car where we could snap pictures of the Oil Creek Valley as we rumbled through.  The train made a stop at the end of the line where we were allowed to get off and stretch our legs while the engine moved to the other end of the train and pulled us back to Titusville.  We also got to tour the museum/gift shop and visit the adjacent Caboose Hotel which is made up entirely of, you got it, actual cabooses (or is that cabeese?).  For $90 a night, it’s a novel and more than adequate accommodation.

During the trip, we met a lovely woman whose name I cannot remember.  She sat next to us on the train.  We learned she’s been on the road traveling full-time for the past seven years in her campervan.  The van has no bathroom facilities, so she has to make do with public restrooms.  More often than not, she parks in Wal Mart lots rather than pay for campgrounds.  She’s already seen all of the lower 48, but now she’s returning to visit the capital city of each state. Along the way, she likes to take in the sights as she was doing today.  She says she flies home to Oregon four times each year, I suppose to deal with her house and other practical issues and to just get off the road for a moment, though she seems quite content to continue traveling.  She says she’s 69 years old and doesn’t want to waste anymore time.  Can’t say I blame her.

We had dinner out and came home, absolutely exhausted. Something about sweating up a storm all afternoon (I think it finally hit 90 degrees here) just wore us out. I did manage to get my final grades posted and sent the last of my mails to my summer students.  The course is officially over, thank goodness! I still have schoolwork to do this summer, but only in preparation for fall classes.  There will be no papers to grade for a month and a half!

Monday, July 11

Alexis returned to work and was grateful to find all the weekenders and their Internet-hogging laptops gone.  This meant it was actually possible for her to do her job without wanting to stick her eyes out with a rusty fork.  I, in the meantime, hopped in the truck and headed for Clarion County to do yet more Allegheny Geotrail caches.  Clarion County is comprised of beautiful, rolling farmlands flanked by lush forests.  I cleaned up that county in short order, went to the Chamber of Commerce in Clarion (a surprisingly vital little college town), got my geocoin, chatted with the cacher who worked the front desk, and then went on to Forest County.  Forest County is at the edge of the Allegheny National Forest, and I must say it’s just gorgeous.  I drove around a curve late in the afternoon to find myself on the middle of a bridge over the Allegheny River, the mountains falling away into the hazy, idyllic river valley.  You’ve heard the term “sweeping vistas,”  well, Forest County has them aplenty.

I saw my first real-life fly fisherman in hip waders standing in the Allegheny doing his thing.  Fly fishing is a major part of the tourist economy in Forest and the surrounding counties.  Fishing and game hunting together are probably the premiere industry there. There are outfitters everywhere hawking fishing gear, kayak rentals, trail guides, you name it. There are hunting camps all along the roads, too.

I spotted an actual mink on my drive.  I wasn’t sure what it was when it first scampered across the road, but when I stopped at a sporting goods store located at the intersection of Highways 62 and 666 (no, that’s not a typo) to buy a commemorative “Devil’s Highway” t-shirt for Alexis, I noticed the shop had lots of pieces of taxidermy about, one of which looked a lot like a rather large, dark brown ferret.  I asked the proprietor what it was, and he explained that wild mink are fairly common in the area.

But I don't WANT to go East!

I quite nearly finished my six caches in Forest County, but the last one looked to be a doozy with challenging terrain and a puzzle to solve to boot.  With only an hour left before full dark, I decided to save it for another day when I will return to the area, find the cache, and retrieve my fifth coin of the series.  That will mean I’m officially halfway through with the geotrail!

The counties remaining are Jefferson, Elk, McKean, Potter, and Cameron.  These are the counties that are deep in the Allegheny National Forest and are likely to offer me the greatest challenges in terms of terrain.  I’ve discovered that when cache owners in this area rate a cache 2 out of 5 in terms of the difficulty of the terrain, they don’t quite mean the same thing that folks in Baltimore or San Antonio mean when they rate a cache a 2.  Here a two means drive down a track that in rain or snow will be four-wheel drive only, park in the middle of nowhere, hike halfway up a mountain, grab the cache, and then tumble back down to your vehicle (or, alternately, slog through a bug-infested wetland with six-foot tall marsh grass for half a mile each way).  Either way, their 2′s feel like 4′s to me.  I’m steeling myself for treks over some rugged country.  Knowing my own physical limitations and the gross underrating of cache difficulty in this area, I”m steering clear of anything rated a 3 or higher.  God knows what I’d find myself in the middle of!  I’ve still got a couple of weeks to work my way through the five other counties, so I believe I’m going to make it before we leave on the 28th.  Alexis and I are going to do McKean County this Saturday because we will end up at the Zippo Lighter museum in Bradford, PA, to pick up our coin, and she’s dying to go there.  She’s not a smoker, but she loves a Zippo lighter.  I will probably knock out Jefferson County before this weekend, so come next week, only three counties will remain, the three most distant from us.

Geocaching in and of itself is free, but the diesel that powers the truck that takes me to said caches is not.  I spent $53 Monday working my way through 11 caches.  There is a lot of driving involved.  I left Corry before 10 a.m. and didn’t return until 8 p.m.  The caches were, for the most part, quite easy, so only about two hours of that time were actually spent on the trail.  The rest of the day, I was driving.  There’s no NPR in this part of the country, so I’ve gotten to know just about every song on top-40 country radio by heart in the past couple of weeks.  A personal favorite right now is Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem.” Why?  Because every time it comes on, I am, in fact, “cruisin’ down a dirt road, laid back, swervin’ like I’m George Jones.”  The only thing that’s missing is the ice-cold beer in the console.  Don’t want to get caught by the county mounties with that!

The Road Less Traveled

There are a lot of dirt roads in this part of the country, and at the far end of each one, there seems to be a geocache. I don’t know how anyone would survive a winter here without four-wheel drive.  I’ve seen a lot of “No Winter Maintenance” and snowmobile crossing signs on my travels.  Caching from November through March must be an extreme sport, indeed.

Tuesday, July 12

Today was absolutely uneventful.  I woke up feeling unwell. I find it hard to stay hydrated when I’m caching on very humid days like Monday, despite the fact that I carry water with me and drink constantly (which also means I have to pee constantly — I’m mastering the art of squatting in the woods as a result).  I went through at least 64 ounces of water plus a soda yesterday, but it wasn’t nearly enough.  I still woke up with a mild hangover without having enjoyed the revelry that usually precedes it.  I took some migraine medicine, got a nice, hot shower, drank loads more water, and spent half the day in bed.  It wasn’t until late in the afternoon when I really got up and about.  Then I took out the trash, walked the dogs, dumped the holding tanks, and washed a couple of loads of laundry before going and grabbing some dinner and watching TV with Lex while I worked on uploading pictures from our travels to Flickr.  So, basically, any good I did by tramping around in the woods on Monday was negated by my absolute sloth today.

What will the rest of the week hold?  Well, who knows?  Geocaching, certainly.  More laundry, without a doubt.  Reading, cooking, cleaning, blogging — affirmative.  Sleeping, yes.  In fact, that’s where I’m headed right now.  Good night!

Tuesday morning was back to work.  I spent much of the day answering e-mails, reading discussion threads, and grading essays.  Alexis, too, had an avalanche of mails to which to respond and phone calls to field.  The day was a busy one. 

At the end of it, we decided to spend the evening relaxing.  First we took a walk around the RV park.  We hadn’t explored the part of the park dedicated to seasonal campers, and we wanted to check it out.  Visiting RV parks is a bit like going to an RV show; you get to see lots of different types of rigs and dream about what it might be like to own them.  The difference is that in an RV park you can speak to an owner and find out the truth about the rigs rather than having to sort out fact from fiction during a sales pitch.

Interior of a park model RV

There are a number of park model trailers here.  Park models are RVs that aren’t really meant to travel very often.  They are sometimes called destination trailers because they are meant to be towed to a particular destination, left there for a season, and then towed back into storage.  Some are mounted permanently on blocks, the axles are removed, and they have porches attached to them.  Park models look like small mobile homes and have many of the same features as regular residential homes — shingled roofs, full-size appliances, regular flush toilets.  The rigs cost anywhere from $30-50K, not bad given that they are usually about 10′x40′. You get a lot of bang for your buck.  Park models, however, represent a very different RVing lifestyle, one that is about staying put rather than going places.

As we walked through the park, we talked about what it would be like to park the fifth wheel permanently on a lot in Texas and spend winter break down there while buying a park model and parking it in the cooler climates (like this one) to use as a summer abode.  The fall and the spring we’d spend in good old Baltimore in a traditional residence. Then all we’d have to do is pack our clothes up in the car and head off to our “other homes” for a while.

It’s a different way of thinking about travel, but it’s something many embrace.  A number of folks in this very park are Southerners who spend their summers here in PA enjoying the cooler temps, and I can’t blame them.  It’s lovely here.  Of course, we’re in no position to make that particular dream come true anytime soon, so for right now, it’s just another one of those things on our “maybe one day” list.

Dusk turned into night while we walked,  so we wandered back over to our site. I’d bought some firewood earlier in the afternoon, so we started a campfire in the fire ring out in the yard, pulled up our chairs, and curled up with a lovely eBook!  Yes, that’s right.  We’re in the Pennsylvania wilds in an RV park, but we haven’t abandoned our technology!  Lex stayed outside until she got a mosquito bite, but I remained to read until the fire burned down.

Our campfire

It was lovely and quiet with a nice little chill in the air, the perfect evening to spend around a campfire.  The only unusual thing is that it’s July!  I can honestly say that I’ve never quite enjoyed summer weather as much as I’m enjoying it now.  There are very few bugs, not a great deal of humidity, and most afternoons, it barely hits 80.  That’s what we call winter in Texas.

This is the last week of the summer course I’m teaching, so it’s been imperative for me to grade the research papers the students turned in last Friday quickly.  At the same time, I wanted to have some fun this week, too, so I established a daily grading quota of six essays.  This meant I’ve spend three to four hours each day for the past three days getting the papers done.  As long as I’ve started early in the morning, I’ve had some time in the afternoon to play.  And you know what that means — geocaching!

Crawford County AGT coins

Yesterday around noon after doing my grading, I struck out for Crawford County, adjacent to Erie County where we are currently.  My goal was to find six caches in four hours and get back to the visitors’ bureau in Meadville (about an hour from Corry) before it closed at 4:30 so I could claim my Allegheny Geotrail coin for that county.   I met my goal, and along the way met some nice geocachers with their dog and encountered an amusing muggle, a self-professed “goombah” from NYC.  He actually helped me find one of my caches.  I even had time to find an earthcache, my first, at Canadohta Lake.  An earthcache isn’t a traditional cache.  There is no box to find or log to sign.  Instead, it’s more like a virtual cache.  You go to a set of coordinates and discover some geological phenomenon.  You then have to answer a few questions about what you see.  It was a lot of fun, actually, and I learned a thing or two about the formation of glacial lakes.
I got back home right around 6:00 p.m., in time for Alexis and I to head back out again, this time to Lakewood, New York, about half an hour to the north.  We went to a movie theatre there and saw the new Transformers movie.  It was a nice little midweek date.  We didn’t get back home until just about bedtime, so we both sacked out.

Today, I had every intention of doing another set of Allegheny Geotrail caches in another county, but my students had other ideas.  I had several e-mails to answer this morning, including one from a student who wasn’t happy about his grades.  I had to spend a good bit of time reviewing his grades and his essays and responding to his questions.  This I did not mind doing; what I minded was the very rude tone he took in his mail to me.  Students in online courses are quicker to be disrespectful because they have this sense of anonymity; in essence, they feel they can hide behind the keyboard.  This is one drawback to teaching online.  I generally respond with firmness while remaining professional and polite.  When I don’t return the attack, students usually respond with some contrition, realizing they had been unnecessarily harsh.  This particular student did just that.  Sometimes, the lessons I teach have very little to do with grammar at all.

By the time I was done dealing with this student and got my requisite papers and journals graded, it was too late to accomplish the six caches I wanted to find, so I just dawdled the afternoon away, piddling around the house a bit, researching more caches, updating Facebook — just wasting time until Alexis was done with work.  Once she finished up, we donned our bathing suits and walked across the street to the park’s pool to relax for a while.  We had the pool to ourselves so had fun splashing around until the sun started to slip down beyond the horizon and the air got just a little too cool for us to be in the water.

We came back in, changed, and I made dinner.  Now, it’s nearly bedtime.  I don’t have papers to grade in the morning, so I think I’m going to strike out earlier than usual on my cache hunt.  I’m determined to bring home another AGT geocoin tomorrow!  This is the summer of the geocache, after all.

In two weeks, the RV park is hosting a bus trip to a nearby casino, and I think Alexis and I are going to try to go.  I’ve never actually been in a casino, so this will be quite the experience for me.  I’m sure we’ll be the youngest people on the trip by at least twenty years.  Of course, we’re often among the youngest folks in the RV parks where we stay (just as we are at this one).  Full-time RVing is still primarily the domain of the retired, though younger and younger people are getting involved in the lifestyle as telecommuting becomes more common.  Weekend RVers (the kind who show up in the parks on Friday afternoons and leave two days later) are predominantly couples with children.  It is a cheaper way to travel if you have kids and dogs, to be sure.  There was a family of seven with a huge shaggy, white dog next door to us in a travel trailer earlier this week. I can’t imagine trying to pay for a traditional vacation for seven people plus boarding a pet.  It would just be impossible for most folks. RVing is significantly cheaper.  You pay for your gas, campsite fees, and food, and that’s about it.  Affordable travel is one of our major motivations for doing it, certainly.

Speaking of traditional vacations, on the 22nd, we’re headed to Toronto to visit a couple of Alexis’ Warcraft guildmates (it’s an online game that she plays with a group of people).  She’s met these guys before, but I haven’t.  It’ll be my first trip to Toronto, and I’m hoping to make the most of it by doing some sightseeing, grabbing some Canadian caches, and seeing Niagara Falls on the way back.  We won’t be taking the rig.  Instead, we’ll be boarding the dogs and staying in a hotel in Toronto.  We never get to do that!  It will be a vacation from our vacation!

The weekend before the Toronto trip, we’re hitting two unusual museums in the area – the Lucille Ball museum in Jamestown, New York, and the Zippo Lighter Museum in Bradford, Pennsylvania.  We’re both fans of quirky museums, so that trip should be fun.

This coming weekend, however, I have nothing planned except for paper grading.  The last set of essays comes in Friday at midnight, and I have to have them all graded and returned to students and final course grades calculated by Monday at 10 a.m.  That means two days of hustling. Once it’s done, though, I’m free from paper grading for at least two months!  Not free of schoolwork, though.  Just grading.  I’ll have to start getting my fall courses ready next week.  It’ll take me the rest of the summer to do all the preparation.  But I’m not starting that tonight.  Now is bedtime,  so I wish you all a goodnight wherever you may be.

Edit: Alexis has reminded me that I left out something rather interesting that we discovered here in the area.  This is Amish country, and there are buggy crossing signs everywhere.  I’ve seen a few buggies during the daytime, but what we didn’t know is that the Amish are night owls.  We were coming home from the movies in Lakewood, NY on Wednesday night around 10 p.m., and we saw one Amish man coming out of a convenience store and two buggies just tooling down the road.  So dangerous!  We come around blind corners or over hills, and there they are.  On the way to the movies, we actually saw a buggy turned over in the ditch, and the poor Amish fellow was standing there waiting for help.  His horse appeared to be okay, thank goodness, and a couple of motorists had stopped to help.  Well, one of them may have run him off the road.  I don’t know; we didn’t witness the accident.  I wonder how many Amish are killed each year in the US in collisions with cars?  Lex said she didn’t want to have to make that phone call to GEICO: “Hello, GEICO?  It seems we’ve hit an Amish buggy and destroyed it.  They don’t have insurance, but there’s a nasty dent in our bumper from where we broadsided their horse.”  I can just imagine the adjuster putting us on speaker phone so the entire office could hear and then asking us to repeat the tale while everyone on the other end laughed their butts off.  We’ve learned to take it slow on the back roads around here, especially when we can’t see around the next bend.

Saturday was the main event — Geowoodstock itself!  Alexis and I headed down to the fairgrounds to bid on silent auction items, buy raffle tickets, and sack the vendors for loads of geocaching swag.  The students were already down there cruising the grounds.   It was hot and muggy compared to the week we’d already spent in NW PA, and the sweat was just pouring down off of us.  After walking around for a while and meeting tons of cachers, including some we know from Maryland, I decided to try trading paracord bracelets for pathtags.  I went back to the RV, put the bracelets we’d made on a chain, attached it to my bag with a sign indicating I was trading, and headed back to the grounds. I cleaned up!  I had folks stopping me left and right asking for bracelets.  By the end of the day, I only had about half a dozen bracelets left and had gotten thirty-some tags in trade!  I had a better collection than the one I lost in the woods earlier in the week!  Not too shabby.

The day itself was filled with interesting sights.  Lex and I got our picture made with the Geocaching.com mascot, Signal the Frog.  We spotted at least half a dozen men in Utilikilts (not sure what the connection with kilts and caching is, but there must be something), we petted a dozen different dogs (cachers love their dogs), discovered a variety of trackable items including a surfboard, teepee, and a huge cinder block, and even a trackable tattoo or two. I have yet to find a geocache in which a surfboard or an entire cacher will fit, so I didn’t grab those.  During the middle of the day, we met with other Maryland cachers in front of our state’s banner and took a group photo.  Lex still has all those pictures on her camera, but once she downloads them, I’ll post them.

After that point, Alexis had had enough and went to rest in the RV.  I took yet more bracelets and the paracord down to the “free trade zone” barn where people were swapping coins.  I made at least four custom bracelets while sitting and chatting with cachers.  I worked on the bracelets until about 5, the start of the closing ceremonies.  We had to attend so we could see if we’d won the raffle and to get our photo taken with all the cachers still hanging about the grounds.

After the closing ceremonies, Alexis and I went to check and see if we had won anything in the auction.  I did!  I won three geocoins, two of which were from the Texas Geocaching Association.  Very pretty!  Alas, we did not win the GPS units, but I’m not complaining.  I’m glad we won anything at all!.

Back to the RV we went to rest up for a little while before going to the evening geocoin exchange event at the local fire department.  We went with the students in the school van to the event, swapped coins (I traded bracelets for three geocoins and five more pathtags), marveled at the hardcore collectors with binders full of coins, and then decided to do a little night caching.  There were several in the area, so we drove toward the closest.  Who did we meet there but Wizard and Suzanne, two Dundalk cachers!  They were already on the hunt, so we joined their crew and followed them to the next few caches.  We cached until nearly midnight.  The students took us back to the RV, but they decided to go out and do some more caching.

Later the next day, they told me a fantastic tale of having been stung by bees and encountering drunken cachers while hiking into the forest.  At least they came back to the fairgrounds safely.

I woke up on Sunday morning with a splitting headache.  I felt like I had a hangover, but I hadn’t had anything to drink.  I was just terribly dehydrated.  Like I said, it had been really muggy for the past two days, and I’d not had enough water to drink on Saturday.  It took a lot of water, migraine medicine, and Tylenol to get rid of the headache, but it did disappear around noon or so.

The students had gone out to an event cache at Kinzua Beach and then they went caching afterwards.  Alexis and I had lunch at a restaurant near the fairgrounds and went to find a couple of caches on our own.  I’d offered to make dinner for the students Sunday night before they returned home, so we went to the grocery store to buy some supplies, went back to the fairgrounds, and I made spaghetti with meat sauce, garlic bread, and salad.  They came over around six p.m., brought back all the camping gear they had borrowed, and gobbled up as much dinner as they could hold.  They were determined to strike out into the forest one last time and get the cache they hadn’t found the night before.  I was concerned because this would put them driving so late, but they insisted they’d be fine.  I made them promise they’d let me know how they were and when they got back to Baltimore, and then they were off!

While I adore my student cachers, I was glad they made it back home.  I think they were all cached out after four days in Warren County, and I can’t blame them.  That’s a long time for the contemporary 20-something to be away from technology!

Alexis and I spent one final night at the fairgrounds, got up on Monday morning, packed up the rig, and traveled the twenty miles back to Corry.  Turns out that some of the campers the RV park had been expecting never showed up, so we could have stayed there all weekend if we had wanted to.  But we needed to be onsite to be available if the students needed anything.  Mostly what they had needed was an electrical outlet in which to plug in their phones!   Plus camping at the fairgrounds allowed us to leave the dogs in the rig and go back to walk them periodically.  It would have been a really exhausting event if we hadn’t had a sofa to plop on periodically, too.

We were relieved to be back at Harecreek where the Internet is faster and the sites are actually level.  I will not miss sleeping with my head downhill! Once we got the rig unhitched and connected to the utilities, we went to Perkins to have lunch and then went to go find our first New York cache!  Corry is only about 4.5 miles away from the state line, and we found a guardrail cache called “Just Over the Line” on the NY side of Stateline Road.  Afterwards, we came back to the campground and got our computers all plugged in and everything else put away.  Later, I went for a swim in the pool, and Lex came to dangle her toes in the water.

It was a good day and a relaxing evening.  We stayed in, watched TV, and had leftovers.  I have to say that the campground has much better cable than we do back in Baltimore!

My plan for the week includes grading research papers and working on the Crawford County Allegheny Geotrail caches.  I will earn all of those coins before we leave the area!  This week will be a little busy, though, because I have not one but TWO sets of papers to grade in seven days.  It’ll be a challenge, but once I’m done, no more papers to grade until September.  Woot!

Mind you, I’ll still have work to do over the summer.  There are fall classes for which to prepare, and that’s something I need to chisel away at a little bit each day if I’m going to be ready by the end of August.  But not having e-mails to answer, discussion posts to respond to, or essays to mark for a month and a half will be a relief!

I hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July holiday weekend.  Back to work in the morning.

Alexis spent the day near tears because she was having troubles with our wifi connection. It was her last day of work before a holiday weekend, end of month, and end of quarter. Translation: It was busy. She had such a hard time that we think we may have to invest $200 in a Verizon MiFi to get us through this month. Verizon is the only provider to get 3G in this area. Lex can’t afford not to be able to access her files for work; her telecommuting is contingent on functional tech.

While Lex was banging her head on her desk, I was doing laundry. The machines are so much cheaper here! I got home from the washateria just in time to have to run out again, this time to meet my student geocaching club members at the fairgrounds. A group of five of them drove the six hours from Baltimore this morning to be here for the weekend.

The students are borrowing some of our camping gear, so I dropped that off for them, made sure they got settled into a campsite, and then drove the 20 miles back to the RV.

Alexis and I had to rush to leave Harecreek Campground because the campers who were taking our spot for the weekend arrived early and wanted in the space. Alexis still had an hour and a half of work to do, and I still had to clean up and pack up the rig, so the campers just had to wait.

We rolled out at 5:15. When we arrived at the fairgrounds with the rig, we were met at the gates by a cheering squad of CCBCers. Now I know what Jesus must have felt like when he rode that ass into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday!

We checked in and got to our spot only to find that the ground was so soft and the pitch of the site was so steep that Lex couldn’t get into it. Her tires spun in the mud and the weight of the rig was pulling her down the hill.

We asked permission to move to one of the empty sites nearby. Fortunately, it wasn’t a problem since many of the sites weren’t rented. We found one on more level ground and after a lot of maneuvering got the rig parked. It took a while to level (which we never really accomplished) and hooked up. We’re only on 15 amp, so no A/C or microwave, but that’s okay as it will be in the 40′s tonight. We DO have the juice to run our small space heater!

I’m hoping the students heeded my advice and brought plenty of extra blankets and warm clothes. They did bring a firepit and some firewood, so we sat around that firepit tonight after the sun set and the temps fell quickly.

Our dinner came courtesy of a fellow Geocacher who was grateful that the girls helped him put up his tent. PCSenn, a Baptist preacher from Tennessee, kindly provided us with steaks and tales from the road. Lex grilled up the steaks and Brittany made mashed potatoes — so yummy!

After dinner and chatting around the fire for a couple of hours, we called it a night. The next three days will be full of events, so we need our beauty sleep. Sweet dreams, all!

I spent most of last week getting us ready to go.  I found someone to pick up my mail, stored my car and little trailer at a friend’s house, refilled the propane tanks, did the laundry, got some groceries, unpacked the basement storage, and repacked everything securely.

Friday night, Lex and I hitched up the rig and moved it off its leveling blocks.  I had to use a tire iron to pry the blocks out of the dirt where they’d settled over the ten months we’d been parked.  Let me just say that getting all the spiders, bugs, and mud off of 50 leveling blocks is no fun!  I inspected the tires; they have some dry rot which is worrisome but not unusual for RV’s.  We pulled up the landing gear and spent the night packing up our desks and putting away everything that might shift during the trip.

On Saturday morning, we had some breakfast, pulled in the slides, unhooked the utilities, and we were ready to go.  Well, almost ready.  I had forgotten to turn in my library books, and since we were all hitched up, we just decided to take rig and all up the street to the library.  Fortunately, it’s located in a shopping center with a huge, usually fairly empty parking lot.

It just so happens that the library sits next to a Firestone, so after I’d turned in the books, Lex backed up to the garage, and we had our tires aired up.  The mechanic who took care of the tires said they should endure the trip but we should get them replaced ASAP.  I’m just hoping that he’s right and they make it through the summer.  We can get them replaced before we take the rig anywhere next year.

We were on the road by 11:00 a.m. The trip, according to Google Maps, was supposed to be about 6 hours.  Of course, that means six hours by car, not pulling 12,000 pounds of RV.  That always takes longer because we have to drive more slowly and stop more often for fuel.  As it turns out, this trip also took longer because we spent half of it on winding mountain roads, Lex’s least favorite.

Downgrades are particularly hard because they require near constant braking.  We had the truck equipped with a trailer brake controller, and Lex’s truck has a special tow mode, both of which help save the brakes and the transmission.  Lex got pretty good as working with the brakes while going across mountains last summer, but the Alleghenies presented their own challenges.  We knew we were in trouble when we saw runaway truck ramps every few miles.

After an hour or so on these downgrades (which inevitably alternate with challenging upgrades), we made our second stop of the day for fuel.  When I got out of the truck to start the pump, the brakes were clearly overheated, and the friction had caused a pretty awful smell.  Fortunately, the road after that point wasn’t quite as steep and in fact began to level out as we entered a valley, the Brokenstraw Valley to be exact, in Warren County, Pennsylvania.

After eight hours, Lex’s nerves were shot, the dogs were cagey, I was tired of being cooped up in the truck, and we were thrilled to roll into the gates of Harecreek Campground in Corry, PA.  Gary, the owner, greeted us with a smile and guided us into our campsite, a nice, wide, level pull-through just across the street from the office.  We were told just to get settled in and then head to the office in the morning and check in.  So that’s just what we did.

Once we got all the utilities hooked up and the animals walked and fed, it was about 10 p.m., but we weren’t quite ready to go to bed, so we took a short nighttime drive around Corry just to start to get the lay of the land.  There wasn’t much open at that hour, but we did note that Corry has a Wal Mart, a few chain restaurants, a nice town square, a library, and a little shopping center.  I knew I’d have plenty of time to explore all of this since we’re going to be in the area for a month, so we headed back to the campground and hit the hay around 11:00.

I must have been tireder than I thought because I slept soundly until 10 a.m. the next morning when a wide-awake Lex woke me up telling me the day was wasting.  That almost never happens.  When we can sleep as late as we want, I’m usually the first person awake.  Not this time.  Honestly, I could have slept for another hour or so.

Lex was chomping at the bit to go grab some breakfast, so after we were up and dressed and the dogs were walked, we went on a trek to find someplace that was open on a Sunday morning.  Eventually, we discovered a Perkins where we had brunch and developed a plan for the day.

The night before, we’d realized that there is very little data coverage in the area, so our iPhones, which we use to geocache, were operating on the Edge network, making pages very slow to load.  This could make caching pretty challenging without a regular, handheld GPS.  We haven’t had our own dedicated GPS unit for a while, so we thought we’d go in search of one.

A trip to Corry’s Wal Mart turned up nothing, so we struck out for the nearest population center of any size, Erie, which is about 20 miles away via some back roads.  There are a couple of big sporting goods stores there.  We struck gold at the first one we tried, Gander Mountain.

Though we were looking for the Magellan Explorist GC, we found something better — the Garmin Dakota 10.  It was on sale and had a $100 mail-in rebate.  The deal was so good, that we each bought one of the units.  These are $300 GPSrs, but after the rebate, we will have only paid $129.  Garmin recently came out with the Dakota 20, so I imagine they are trying to close out the 10′s.  The Dakota 10 has a touchscreen and supports geocaching files, allowing the user to see cache descriptions, difficulty ratings, hints, and recent logs.  Of course, these files have to be downloaded from a PC; the units aren’t wireless.  Of course, this is why they are ideal for this sort of remote location.  They don’t rely on cell reception.

Naturally, we had to see if our new GPSrs worked, so we pulled up some caches on our phones, plugged the coordinates into the new units, and discovered that there was a cache directly behind the sporting goods store.  We managed to find three caches in the parking lot of that same giant shopping center before deciding it was dinnertime. Somehow, six hours had slipped away since we’d had brunch at Perkins.

The nearest restaurant was Red Lobster.  We weren’t feeling picky, so Cheddar Bay biscuits and mediocre seafood it was. While we were at dinner, I reminded Alexis that we needed to stop for a piece of coax cable.  We discovered that the campground had cable, but we didn’t have a piece of coax that would reach the hookup.  We stopped at Best Buy to remedy the problem and were almost ready to head back to Corry when I pointed out to Alexis that we were only a couple of miles from Lake Erie.

Since I’d never seen one of the Great Lakes before, Lex humored me and drove me to nearby Presque Isle State Park.  We cruised around the island, stopping briefly at Budny Beach to enjoy the view and the cool breeze and to snap a few photographs.  It was a lovely excursion. I would have liked to have spent more time there, but our pups had already been home alone for quite some time.

On the return trip to Corry, we stopped at Tim Horton’s just to see what all the fuss was about.  Our Canadian friend, Corrine, raves about them.  We don’t quite understand it but suppose it has something to do with  fond childhood associations.  Ah, well.  At least we can mark that off our list of things to do before we die.

We got into Corry around 7:30, stopped for groceries at a local market, and then returned to the campground.  The dogs were thrilled to see us.  We got them walked and fed, Lex got the cable working, and I spent the remainder of the evening downloading geocaches to our new GPS units.  We’re now ready to get our cache on in Northwestern Pennsylvania!

Lex is back to work tomorrow.  We’re hoping the campground’s wifi network will suffice for her purposes.  The Virgin Mifi just isn’t cutting it.  I don’t have a lot of work to do right now.  My students are working on their research papers, so all I have to do is be available to lend support.  That means more time to spend exploring the area.

On Thursday, we’re leaving Corry and heading back down the road to Pittsfield, home of the Warren County Fairgrounds, site of Geowoodstock IX.  We’re meeting a group of my student geocachers there, and we’ll be in Pittsfield for five days before returning to Corry. We’ll stay put in Corry for another three weeks when we’ll head out to Northwestern Ohio for yet another major geocaching event.  While we’re here, we have plans to spend each weekend making day trips to Chautauqua, Niagara Falls, and Toronto. Another goal of mine is to complete the Allegheny Geotrail.  We’ve also discovered a 7.25 mile rails-to-trail, the Corry Junction Greenway Trail.  There are caches all along it.  We want to challenge ourselves to make the hike while we’re here.  It’ll probably take us an entire day to complete because we’re not exactly athletes, but we’ll give it a try!

For now, though, it’s late, and my pillow is calling my name.  Sweet dreams, Dear Reader.

Thanks to Glenn, Jordan, and Alexis for their help.

The night before the party, I was up until 2:00 a.m. making tamales with Alexis and two of our young friends, Jordan and Glenn.  In all, we made ten dozen of the things!  They really are labor- and lard-intensive but oh so good!  We had the tamales, rice, beans, chili, guacamole, salsa, chips, and margaritas, Mexican hot chocolate, and Christmas cookies.  We even bought a Christmas pinata!

There were only adults at the party, but you’d have thought we were a bunch of eight-year-olds when it came time to run and scoop up the candy and toys when the pinata finally broke.  It was freezing and windy that night, but no one cared.  I put to use the propane campfire I bought (and Lex bought me the grill accessories for it as a  Christmas gift). Everyone gathered around it to keep their hands warm while they waited their turn to whack the pinata.

It was a hit! Ha!

My cousin and her boyfriend stayed on our sofa bed the night of the party and the night after that (saved them the long drive back to West Virginia and Ewing’s long commute back to Baltimore to work).  Because I had started getting sick on Christmas Eve, my cousin, Cassia, went with Alexis to her parents’ place on Christmas day for dinner.  I felt bad about not being able to go but was feeling awful. I ended up spending almost all of Christmas week in bed.

Cassia and Ewing knocked out on the sofa

I was feeling better on New Year’s Eve, but Alexis wasn’t.  We were supposed to go to West Virginia that night, but we didn’t.  Instead, we stayed home and watched the ball drop on TV.  At midnight, we went outside and could just see the tops of the fireworks at the Inner Harbor as well as the fireworks being set off all over the neighborhood.

Ringing in 2011 from the comfort of our living room slideout

We didn’t make any particular resolutions this year.  Well, I take that back.  I made one, and that is to try to remember to put appointments and meetings in my iPhone’s calendar so I don’t forget them.  Lex claims she has sworn off soda and juice.  I think we’re both struggling to keep those resolutions at this point.

On January 3, I started teaching an online class for the winter term which is only four weeks long.  It’s fast and furious, but I usually get a good batch of dedicated students and the pay doesn’t hurt, either.  Initially, my plan was to use this extra money plus any tax refund I get to help pay off my car.  Yes, I still owe money on a ten-year-old car.  Shame!

But now, I find we’re both getting a little case of the house lust.  I don’t know if anything will come of it, but we’ve spotted a bank-owned house around the corner.  It’s nothing fancy–one-level rancher, older, in need of repair, three small bedrooms–but it’s even closer to work than we already are.  And it’s cheap.  Very cheap.  We don’t know if we can even secure financing, but we’re thinking of trying.

Might it become ours in 2011?

If we got the place, I suppose we’d store the RV until I could get it paid off and then sell it so we could buy a small Class B rig more suitable for trips than fulltiming.  Why the big change in direction?  Well, I think we’re both disillusioned about how much trouble it really is to travel in this thing, so much so that the ONLY time we want to go out is during the two-month break in the summer.  The other ten months, the thing is just parked.  That’s not really what we’d hoped, I guess.  Live and learn.  I’ve decided I’m definitely going to try to stay at CCBC until retirement (or they boot me out), so I’d like to stay nearby.  It just doesn’t get anymore nearby than this little house!

Last Wednesday, I took a couple of students out geocaching.  I’d had requests from folks to go on a cache hunt over the break, so I set up a date.  Unfortunately, not many could come, but those of us who did had a great day, finding 5 of the 6 caches we went after.  I’m looking forward to getting back to caching with my students on a regular basis once the semester starts and hope to take them on another camping trip at some point, too.

Last weekend was a long one for Alexis (she actually had three long weekends in a row).  She was off Thursday-Sunday, and we decided to spend the day exploring sites in Baltimore we hadn’t visited before.  We started off at the Walters Museum of Art.  I actually got to see an original Raphael! After we left the museum, Alexis took me to find a geocache that was located at the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s central location downtown.  Just a beautiful place!  I only went in and out but will have to go back and really explore the library another time. Then we went to have our first taste of Ethiopian cuisine at a nearby restaurant.  It’s eaten with the fingers and scooped up with a flatbread called injera.  I liked the food, but would have preferred rice over the injera.  It has a very strange texture that is akin to a slightly rubbery crepe.  After that, we went next door to a local barber shop, and Lex got a very sharp haircut!  It took four and a half hours, including all the waiting for other patrons to get done, but we had fun. It was a wonderful day!

Yes, that's a heart carved into Alexis' head!

The very next day, we took a young friend of ours, Edward, to Frederick, Maryland, about an hour’s drive away, so he could visit Hood College where he’ll be transferring this spring.  While he was touring the school and signing up for classes, we went hunting caches and exploring the town.  He called and let us know he was ready to go, so we picked him up and continued our cache hunt, snagging a cache right out in front of the city hall.  After that, we went to have some lunch at a local coffeehouse and drove home.  Frederick really is a quaint little town.  If you are ever in Maryland, I’d recommend it as a nice, relaxing day trip away from the hustle and bustle of the Baltimore-D.C. corridor.

What are those naughty cupids up to?

A year ago, you might remember that I took a camping trip in January just because I could.  We’ll, I’d decided to make it an annual trek.  I’d made up my mind to go this past weekend no matter what (even though a little snow blew through and the temperatures dropped frighteningly low), so Alexis braved the elements and came with me.  We went to Greenbelt Park, probably the least isolated campground in the entire NPS system, located just outside the Washington D.C. beltway.  Temps got down to 19 degrees last Saturday night (the coldest weather I’ve ever camped in), but we built our campfire, cooked up a steak dinner, shivered in the cold, and then finally climbed into the car tent I bought last year.

We were actually quite warm in there because I have awesome zero-degree sleeping bags that kept us toasty.  We just weren’t very comfortable.  The back of my Volkswagen Golf just isn’t made for two large women and one tiny dog.  Our larger dog, Otis, slept soundly on the front seat with a blanket draped over him.  It obviously got below 32 degrees in the car overnight because the condensation on the windows froze!  It would have been a tolerable evening, but at midnight, a truck rolled into the campground right behind us blasting its stereo for an hour.  They quieted down for a couple of hours before starting up again at 3 a.m..  They continued this way until 5 a.m. when they left the campground.  What on earth?

There was no campground host nearby, and the rangers only swept through once early in the evening. I would have felt safer knowing there was some park official nearby.  It’s sad to see how poorly staffed national parks are.  We had to use the “iron ranger” to pay our campsite fee when we arrived. I understand this is the off season, but there were still probably half a dozen occupied campsites that we observed. While there are no electrical or water hookups, there are heated bathrooms and showers and an RV dumpsite.  Most of the sites were appropriate for smaller (30′ and under) rigs, but I even saw a couple of pull-throughs.  It’s the closest campground to D.C., and it’s cheap at $16 a night.  And despite the cold and understaffing, I’d only feel comfortable going there in the winter.  Apparently, the rest of the year they have a horrible tick problem.  There were signs and brochures everywhere warning folks against ticks and Lyme disease.  Scary!  Despite how suburban the park is, we did see some deer on our way out of the park Sunday morning.  And trust me, it was bright and EARLY Sunday morning.  We didn’t even stick around to make breakfast.  After not sleeping most of the night, we were ready to go home.

But will I do it again next year?  You bet!  This South Texan rather likes giving Old Man Winter the finger.  He will not defeat me!  I rather like confronting the cold weather head-on every once in a while.  Makes the cabin fever just a little less.  There are a couple of other Maryland state parks that stay open in the winter, so I might have to give one of them a try next time.  Lex and I are still considering a weekend away in a cabin in the mountains of Western Maryland next month to celebrate her birthday.  We’ll have to wait and see if we have the money to do it, but if we do, it could be fun!

So this week has been back to work for both of us.  Pre-semester meetings have started for me, and I have papers from my winter class to grade, and Lex is enjoying the last couple of weeks before she has to start her graduate courses again.  My spring semester doesn’t begin until January 31, but there is plenty to be done between now and then.

And that’s the last month in a nutshell.  We’re looking ahead, beyond this very busy spring coming up, to this summer’s trip.  Right now, we’re planning on spending it in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.  Alexis has a friend in Charleston, I’ve always wanted to see Savannah, and Florida is the only Southern state our rig hasn’t seen yet.  We’ve decided to keep the trip smaller this time, travel fewer miles, camp in one place longer, but take more day trips and actually see more of the areas that we do visit.  I’m looking forward to exploring the Gullah islands, plantation country, and the beaches of Northern Florida.  Watch out ‘gators and skeeters, here we come!

When I paid my rent last month, I wrote a note complaining.  I’d actually called and talked to the property manager a few weeks before, and I was told that when the water table lowered, we wouldn’t have the issue anymore.  Baloney, and I knew it.  So when a few dry weeks passed and the problem persisted, I wrote the letter.

Lo and behold, it worked! A plumbing company came earlier this week and scoped out the situation, and for the past two days they’ve been redigging the entire septic field. While they worked Creepy Groundskeeper just stood around and stared at them like he always does. You can see him in the foreground of this picture with the plaid flannel hoodie and the silver hair.

Lex tried to speak to him at some point yesterday and ask him a question about the work that was being done, but he refused to answer her, instead responding, “Why do you want to know?”  When she said she was just curious, he told her that curiosity killed the cat.  WTF?  What is wrong with that man?  Would it have killed him to be a decent human being and answer her question directly?  I just don’t understand some people.  I actually was raised in a barn (or within 10 feet of one, at least), so what the hell is his excuse?

When they were done, they spread the remaining gravel over the driveway and created parking spaces for our cars.  Too bad they didn’t have enough foresight to ask us to move our rigs for a day so they could give us gravel pads for the trailers, too (which we desperately need).

Even so, I’m thrilled that even this much has been done.  I went out to dump the tanks today, and for the first time in a long time, no sewage backed up into the dump hose.  The black water just washed right down like it’s supposed to.  Yay!  I really was not looking forward to a frozen lake of poop in the front yard or a dump hose that split after freezing solid because the sewage wouldn’t drain properly.

So it’s looking like my strategy may be working after all.  There really IS power in numbers.  All of us were complained about the sewage issue, and it eventually got resolved.  Now to see about pushing for those gravel pads which are absolutely essential if we ever need to bug out in a flood or heavy snow.

For now, I’ll savor being able to dump the tanks.

Oh!  In other news, I found a plastics company not far away that will sell me an 8′x4′ sheet of coroplast for $12.  Wow!  So much cheaper than I imagined.  That sheet of plastic plus some fiberglass insulation, and I should be able to rig up a replacement underbelly pan.  Just in time, too.  We’ve had our first light frost already, and the weather is getting colder.  I need to cover up the bottom of the rig ASAP.  I’ll probably go pay them a visit next Monday afternoon and pick up the plastic.