Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Shawnee State Park, Schellsburg, PA; May 31 – June 6, 2016

This is an odd park – it is huge: 9 picnic areas, a big lake, 293 campsites, hiking and biking trails, hunting, fishing, and more. While the sites are mostly open with high shade, sites aren't particularly large or level, campers with pets are segregated from the rest, there are only about five restrooms all the camping areas, and while they have flush toilets, the showers are push button and no water temperature adjustment :( .

The campground is near the small town of Schellsburg which has many beautiful, old homes and is a friendly little town with a small cafe/grocery store which serves great frozen custard. While there we visited the Flight 93 Memorial, saw some covered bridges, and visited the Old Bedford Village.

The Flight 93 National Memorial is located in the field where the fourth of the highjacked flights on 911 crashed after the passengers struggled to keep the plane from reaching its target, believed to be the Capitol or perhaps the White House. There is a huge amount of information in the visitor center and the grounds are a good mix of information, memorial wall, the crash site, and a path one can walk beneath newly planted trees, across a creek and up to the visitor center. The memorial is a beautiful monument to the heartbreak and heroism that was Flight 93. P
There are 14 covered bridges within about an hour and a half drive. We saw two – it was a nasty, rainy day – one was Colvin Bridge, a multiple kingpost design built in 1866 and the second the Claycomb Bridge, a burr truss design built in 1880, at the Old Bedford Village.

The Old Bedford Village is a collection of 40 buildings – some original and others replicas – of homes and businesses from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Most buildings had period furnishings or artifacts and some had a volunteer who demonstrated skills needed in every day life of the period. One visitor likened it to a “non-commercialized Williamsburg”. There was ample opportunity for visitors interacting – in the whitesmith shop, tin squares with patterns taped on top were available for punching,
there were props available for kids to borrow from the visitor's center while they visited the village, and more. Several times throughout the year there are special programs with reenactments of historical times. The day we visited, we were “met” General Robert E. Lee, and two other Confederate generals and they told us their stories. There was a drummer and fife player who played several tunes and several other folks who demonstrated military weaponry. All-in-all, it was a delightful way to spend the day.

A side note about the Claycomb covered bridge – it was moved to the Old Bedford Village in 1975. The expected cost of moving the bridge was over $100,000, however, after the bridge was disassembled, it was found that in order to support the busloads of schoolchildren that would visit, it needed to be reinforced with steel beams, which increased the cost to more than $600,000. This unexpected expense, coupled with a county or city upgrade to the water system has eaten up the funds expected to be used for maintenance and improvements at the site. This is an under visited but eminently worthwhile living history village. If you're ever in the area, plan on a visit and take a few extra bucks to leave as a donation to their maintenance fund. I think you'll find it's well worth it.

The weather here has been typical of the rest of this year's – rainy. About 6:30 in the evening after visiting the old village we got emergency weather alerts on our phones that we were under a flood watch and a tornado warning. A few moments later a park ranger came by and told us to be prepared to move to the restrooms if he came by with his siren and lights going. Happily, that didn't happen, but we've had more flood/tornado scares this year than during any previous trips. Of course, we went west in previous years and stayed south until we were west of Texas, so stayed a little more out of the way. Hopefully we'll be able to continue to miss any really bad weather. Our flood experience in Louisiana was quite enough for me!

On our return from one of our day trips, we noticed an off-road type RV – the one in the photo is actually one we saw in Jasper, Texas in 2014, since I didn't get a photo of this one – and spent some time talking with the couple who lived in it. They've been to Israel, Japan, China, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, coming to the US from South and Central America!

One of the first days at the campground, we noticed that the top of the dumpster in our loop had collapsed into the unit. We wondered what had caused it and the morning we left, we saw a bear trap had been put in place near the dumpster. Guess there was a hungry bear around!

We leave for Thompkins Campground, Cowanesque Lake in the morning.