After an unpleasant stop at the Georgetown office that caused me to hit the most amount of Friday traffic out of Washington, DC, I was underway to the first evening of my adventure to Montreal. The plan was to meet Mike at Caledonia State Park in Pennsylvania. He was driving the RV directly from the farm and I was traveling in the Jeep. He arrived first and found a fairly decent campsite for us with electrical hook ups (the minimal luxury necessity), which is all very lucky given that it was a Friday night, just a couple hours from the DC area (5 hours in traffic) and we didn't have reservations. Making reservations on what I like to term as a Gypsy-Trek is impossible. The idea being that you just meander on a day-by-day basis where you have no idea where exactly you will end up and how long it will take you to get there. Caledonia State Park was a really nice pine forest slightly up into the mountains that surround the 81 valley corridor, where the temperatures were 10 degrees cooler, just 15 minutes off the highway, and the air was filled with pine fragrances. The campground was very full of what appeared to be an average slice of Pennsylvania. The brochure for the campground stated that the campground was "open from the start of trout season to the end of dear season." We really know then that we were entering the world of hunters. The type of place where you can legally be shot if hiking on a trail without an orange blazer and everyone talks about what an idiot the dead hiker was an makes no mind of the beer-impaired hunter with the 6th grade education that fires at any moving thing without regard to the type of mammal he is killing. Forget the fact that the hunting license process requires training that you only aim for the deer's heart or a narrow spot just behind its head and that you get a read on the age and sex of the deer before you fire...but out here, if it ain't flashing orange, who cares what it is...just wave your gun in that direction and let em have it. Ahh...the great out doors.Friday, August 12, 2011
Caledonia State Park, PA
After an unpleasant stop at the Georgetown office that caused me to hit the most amount of Friday traffic out of Washington, DC, I was underway to the first evening of my adventure to Montreal. The plan was to meet Mike at Caledonia State Park in Pennsylvania. He was driving the RV directly from the farm and I was traveling in the Jeep. He arrived first and found a fairly decent campsite for us with electrical hook ups (the minimal luxury necessity), which is all very lucky given that it was a Friday night, just a couple hours from the DC area (5 hours in traffic) and we didn't have reservations. Making reservations on what I like to term as a Gypsy-Trek is impossible. The idea being that you just meander on a day-by-day basis where you have no idea where exactly you will end up and how long it will take you to get there. Caledonia State Park was a really nice pine forest slightly up into the mountains that surround the 81 valley corridor, where the temperatures were 10 degrees cooler, just 15 minutes off the highway, and the air was filled with pine fragrances. The campground was very full of what appeared to be an average slice of Pennsylvania. The brochure for the campground stated that the campground was "open from the start of trout season to the end of dear season." We really know then that we were entering the world of hunters. The type of place where you can legally be shot if hiking on a trail without an orange blazer and everyone talks about what an idiot the dead hiker was an makes no mind of the beer-impaired hunter with the 6th grade education that fires at any moving thing without regard to the type of mammal he is killing. Forget the fact that the hunting license process requires training that you only aim for the deer's heart or a narrow spot just behind its head and that you get a read on the age and sex of the deer before you fire...but out here, if it ain't flashing orange, who cares what it is...just wave your gun in that direction and let em have it. Ahh...the great out doors.
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