Quess who's coming??

4th of July 2010

Shawnee State Park
Schellsburg, PA

All forecasts predicted it was going to be 100 degrees plus all weekend. All I know is it was HOT HOT HOT.

We took ½ day on Friday and were there and set up by 2:30. Short drive just up hill all the way.

There are 2 geo-caches there on the Lakefront Trail, so we biked down to the lake. When I say down, I mean OMG this is the side of a mountain (yeah, so a little drama here-but, it was a really steep hill). Problem was, even as we were doing the down part, I knew that the up part was going to be a killer. The Lakefront Trail is 3.4 miles long, and obviously circles around the lake and also over a dam.

The first cache took us back a second trail at which point we had to ditch the bikes and hike that trail for a good half mile. After that, there was a good distance of bushwacking involved before finding the cache. You know me and the poison ivy/oak/sumac hysteria, butch just keeps telling me that it’s not poison. I think he knows to lie to me even if I am standing in it.

Of course, after all that tromping, I forgot to take a picture of the cache, so this is the only picture I got of it.  Um , yeah, its thataway!

The second cache was near the beach. To get to it, you had to climb up a path, and then hang off the edge of the cliff (okay, but it was a sheer hill) by hanging onto a tree, and the cache was in a hidey hole at the bottom of the tree. I was tromping through while butch was down below, and once I decided it had to be right around here, he spotted it.

We finished the loop at the beach (that just cracks me up-you're at a lake, there is no beach at a lake-it’s just some sand trucked in and dumped), we hadn’t thought to throw the bathing suits in the bag, but we were content to plop down under a shade tree and relax a while. And the hill that was so great going down....it was killer going up.  There was no way you could ride a bike up it, so we'd push the bikes for a while, rest a while, and keep on going.

The night sky there was really clear and the stars were just amazing. Even saw a couple of shooting stars.

It was so hot that we’d hike around in the morning a bit and just try to stay cool in the afternoon. We left Monday around noon & didn’t have much trouble with the holiday traffic, which was way cool. (even if the day wasn't)

In one basket

dumb shit...
we went to the store the other day and i thought we needed eggs-i was sure we were down to the last couple.  we don't eat them often so it's always a guess when we need them.  did our thing at the market, and got home and unloaded and started putting things away. 
can you kinda guess where this is heading?
butch was carefully taking the 18 eggs out of the carton and putting them in their box that goes into the fridge door.  he was saying that we really hadn't needed any as there were still about 6 or 8 left. 
now are you getting a clue as to where this is heading yet?
yep, you got it.  he pulled the fridge door open and went to put the box into the door and didn't quite clear the door.  i had my back to him and all i heard was pow-pow-pow a whole bunch of times.  i turned around and there was butch looking down at basically 2 dozen eggs smashed all down the inside of the fridge, inside all the door shelves, all under the produce drawers, all under the fridge, all over the floor, and amazingly, not on him.  figures, he never gets dirty like that, i'm the one that would have been wearing most of them-i think he had like one spot on his shoe.
all he kept muttering as we had to completely take apart the fridge to get gallons and gallons of egg cleaned up was..
"every damn one of them, i can't believe i broke every damn one of them!"

June 6th

Saturday night we got packed up and pretty much ready to go.
This is when butch shoved a picnic table in front of me when i was on my bike and i hurt myself.  Okay, so the picnic table was concreted into the ground and butch was all the way at the back of the beast putting his bike on the bike rack, and i had a stupid idea, and then he laughed really long at the outcome of my idea.
(see a couple of posts ago)

Sunday morning we headed out to do the sewer dump thing and get over to the visitor center by 9am.  We were going on a tour of Camp Rapidan. Feel free to look it up for the long story.  The short story is that when they created Shenandoah National Park, President Hoover bought a parcel of land and created what was a presidential retreat.  It was where he could escape the rat race of DC and where he thought he could actually get some work done.  Too bad this was during the depression and all of this was perceived by newspapers and people as not caring about the country.  Well, that and the fact that he thought that government couldn't get the country out of the depression that it would take private industry to make that change.  Sounds a lot like the idiots of today-maybe they should read their history and find out that it wasn't until FDR and his "alphabet soup" of government programs to get change started.  Then of course the war came on and that pulled the country out of the mess Coolidge had gotten us into.  Sorry, history and politics-the two things that get me jumping.

Anyway, we got on a bus that the NPS referred to as the Hoover Mover down to Camp Rapidan.  The ranger that led the tour had a history masters degree and was tremendously knowledgeable up until someone asked him who Hoover's vice president was...he got a bit offended.  it took us 30 minutes to drive 6.4 miles.  The road, she wasn't the best, and was all hairpin turns down the side of the mountain.

There was not much left of the camp as it had later been turned into a boy scout camp and had been abandoned for a good bit.  The cabin that was the Hoovers was named the Brown House tongue in cheek with the other color house they lived.

This is the view from Pres. Hoovers private trout stream up to the back of the Brown House.

This fireplace was built for photo op's.  Notice it is outside, and nothing around it.  They'd put two chairs out by a roaring fire, and let the photogs in for some very controlled pictures.

It was about a 3 hour tour, (no Gilligan) and we headed on home after having some lunch. Always seems to rain on the way home.

June 4-6

Big Meadow Campground

Skyline Drive

Shenandoah National Park

Friday

I took a half a day vacation on Friday, and we got an early start down the road. Butch decided to take a different route than I-81 all the way down the valley, and we hopped over to Fort Royal, and went down 340. This eliminated one set of mountains for us to haul the behemoth up and over. It was a nice ride. Till we got to the Park and started climbing up the mountains. Thankfully, the speed limit on Skyline drive is only 35 mph-there were times, we weren’t doing much more than that.

When we checked into the campground, the ranger had us read and sign a paper that said we would promise to “DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE” in addition, any food that we had outside would be tied up in trees. I’m thinking okay, I’ll not feed the deer, but when she said about the food in the tree thing, it hit me. Damn, that means bears.

blink-blink

Yeppers.

Okay.

Seems a momma and 2 cubs had “taken” two fawns earlier in the week.

sigh, that’s a little too close to nature for me to see.

Ranger Hazel then let us know that we really needed to get a move on it, cause they just had a severe thunderstorm alert just go over the air. We busted our butts down to the campsite, and battened down the hatches before all hell broke loose. Somehow, being at an altitude of 3,535 and having huge thunder and lighting boomers at 4,000 was a bit unnerving, since we were the only camper that was sticking out from under the trees, and we were basically sitting in a big metal box. Yeah, it has rubber wheels on the ground, but it also has 4 hydraulic metal jacks on the ground also. But the storm passed and we made it without any strikes which was a-ok by me.

Saturday

We got up in the morning and hopped on the bikes and headed to the visitor center (it was uphill both ways-I swear!) We went through their display and learned a bunch about the history of the park and how they took it from the people who lived on the mountain. They have a ton of programs that you can do while on Skyline drive. At this time, our only modes of transport are the motorhome, and the bikes, so we really don’t stray very far from the campgrounds. And since we’ve gone there and done the drive in the past that was ok.

There is a restaurant at the visitors center so we went ahead and had lunch there before we made the uphill bike ride to camp.

We went out on a Ranger lead hike late in the afternoon. The hike was up the Appalacian Trail and to a point called Black Rock. We hadn’t gone that far when a group coming towards us warned of a bear on the trail ahead.

blink-blink

oh, jeez

It was the momma bear and 2 cubs.

The cubs were up in the rocks and mom was out prowling around for food (thankfully, only grubs).  We had to wait out that bear as she wandered down and across the trail, and back up and into the rocks again. The pictures of her walking across the trail right in front of us didn’t turn out to good, I figure operator (t)error was the culprit. That and I kept hearing the ranger saying “Sir, sir, you really need to step back behind me-sir?” Oh, yeah, I look up and of course, it’s butch she’s trying to get to listen to her. (see, he doesn’t have the selective hearing with just me) The bear finally got far enough away that we could get by and to say we moved quickly, was an understatement.  I know, I know-oh, it was only a little black bear.

Whatever...it was a freakin bear!!

we hiked on up to the outlook which was really cool, and would have been even better if a storm hadn’t been coming in.

  

Can you tell from the hands on the hips the attitude I'm getting?  This is because I've just told him not to get too close to the edge-for about the hundreth time.  This is the indignant-"I am NOT too close to the edge!" look I got for just looking out for his best interest.  Plus, I can't drive that rig on flat ground much less down the side of the mountains.  I needed him not to fall!

 

Part 2 coming soon

drafter-0.....picnic table-1

me...

bike.....

picnic table-concreted into the ground

equals

 

outside of leg

inside of leg

I barked the skin off the front of my shin, where the dreaded table actually hit me, and it didn't even bruise.  Last night butch says OMG look at your leg, and here you go.  It's a pretty amazing combination of blacks and blues today.  Can't wait for the green phases to show up later in the week.  This all happened Saturday night when we were loading the bikes onto the bike rack (we needed an early start Sunday morning).  I thought I'll just ride up around the front of the motorhome while butch is loading his bike and make sure that I'm in a good gear.  Sometimes I just never learn.  After the picnic table jumped in front of me and caused me to crash into it, I yelled for butch to help me.  He came around and looked at me laying across the seat of the picnic table, with the bike laying on top of me and helped me up, once he stopped laughing.  Thank goodness he didn't think to go get the camera.  The two old queens camped across from us sure got a good laugh.

May 21-23rd

Cadorous State Park

Hanover PA

We took off after work and about 2 hours later were at Codorous State Park near Hanover, Pa. I can see where that place would be packed during the summer. In addition to the big lake they also have quite a pool. We were parked up in the “D” loop which meant we had a nice big camping space, but not much shade. Seeing as it was a field that they turned into campsites. We had a good bit of rain, but fortunately, it was mostly at night.

We did some Geo-caching on our bikes Saturday. Found 3 couldn’t find 2. But one of those had been marked with the incorrect co-ordinates, so in my mind, that’s not a miss.