Indiana to Pennsylvania

Beaver River Campground, Lakeville,  Indiana; Huron River Valley Resort, Huron, Ohio; Top-a-Rise RV, Jamestown, New York; June 24-27, 2013

  

A pretty sight - muti-colored fields of crops

Since these were one-night stops, we didn’t spend any time wandering around or doing anything particularly interesting, but there were some high and low spots.

Tony Packo's Hot Dogs

The first night out, we stayed at Beaver River Campground, which was another of the so-so places we found – the restrooms were sadly lacking, the advertised wi-fi only worked near the office, and the place wasn’t particularly well maintained. We had a bit of a storm overnight, and the next morning there were tree limbs down all over. As we were leaving, a couple of folks pulled in to talk with the people next to us and I heard the man say that a pop-up by them had been crushed by a tree. I asked if there had been anyone in the pop-up and he just looked at me and said he didn’t know. The look on my face must have been more expressive than I thought since they all hopped into their truck and raced back to the area they came from. Apparently, there was no one in the pop-up, thank goodness.

Notice the many axles on this truck.

Dickens says hello

The drive the next day netted us some Packo’s Hungarian Hot Dogs in Toledo – the ones Klinger in the M*A*S*H serieswaxed poetic about. They were good, but at more than $7/pound they should be! That night was spent at Huron River Valley Resort – a misnomer if ever there was one. The setting was beautiful, but the engineering of the place left a lot to be desired. All the sites available to overnighters were difficult to get level in (especially if one wanted to stay hooked up in order to speed up departure in the morning), the bathrooms smelled as though there was a broken sewer line around, the gravel “drive” on which one was supposed to park was so narrow the truck wouldn’t fit, much less the trailer. 
 

Top-O-Rise

Top-O-Rise

Our third day took us into the SW corner of New York to a little place called Top-O-Rise RV Park near Jamestown, NY. This was another beautiful spot that was not going to win any prizes for good bathrooms, but they were clean. The owner was delightful and I can see us stopping there again.
One of the things we’ve noticed about many of these little RV parks in the north, especially members of Passport America, is they are geared toward seasonal folks, many of whom have a trailer parked on the site for years as a summer cottage. Folks at these places often tend to be cliquish and not particularly friendly to those who overnight. In addition, the facilities at these parks are often not as clean as we’d like.

Now we head out to an Army Corps of Engineers park on Cowanesque near Thompkins, Pennsylvania.

Linder Point Campground, Coralville Lake, Iowa City, Iowa ; June 17-24, 2013

Coralville Lake was another Corps of Engineers park and a beautiful one. We stayed at a small  
campground within the park – Linder Point – and we enjoyed our time there. While there, we visited

An Amish horse and buggy

the Kalona Colony (an Amish settlement) and found some wonderful cheese and baked goods, a great bulk grocery store, and beautifully crafted clothing. Horse-drawn carts were common there, and not all houses had electricity.
 

 We also spent several hours wandering through the Amana Colony, where we found stores with many kinds of handmade   All pieces of furniture were made by one of the seven craftsmen (two of whom were women) and only one craftsman worked on an item, then signed it when completed.  I’m still lusting after a couple of the pieces we saw while there.  [She’ll lust for a long time, the least expensive kitchen chair we saw was over $700.RP]

items – some beautiful woven blankets, all sorts of kitchen items, toys, several specialty food shops with lunch counters, and the most beautiful furniture either of us had ever seen.

One of the interesting things about Coralville Lake was the Divonian fossil Gorge that had been uncovered during the floods the summer of 1993 when water poured over the emergency spillway at Coralville Lake and eroded a deep channel into the underlying bedrock deposits. It is now possible to walk across acres of Devonian-age (around 375 million years ago) sea floors and get a first-hand look at features normally hidden from view or glimpsed only in vertical cuts along roadsides or in quarries.

We spent one evening with Sue and Jim, talking about our time at QTP and catching up on the years since we’ve seen each other.  It was great to see them both and the evening went by all too quickly.

One of the blades of a windmill

From here, we’ll have a series of three one-night stopovers, then to Pennsylvania.

Chappell, Nebraska; Creekside RV Park and Pawnee State Recreation Area, Lincoln, Nebraska June 10-17, 2013

Chappell is a little town of 902 people, and its claim to fame was the 3.6 million bushel grain elevator built in 1914, which in its hey-day, was the largest in the area. The grain elevator is still busy day and night, attested to by the many trains and trucks that stop throughout the day and night. campground was conveniently located behind the elevator and next to the train tracks, on which about 75 trains traveled, night and day. Making the ambiance over the top, there was a road crossing the tracks about 200 yards, which ensured that each train gave two longs, a short, and a long whistle as they approached the crossing. Some engineers were long-winded (I think they were always the ones on the night shift) and the whistles seemed to go on forever. Many of the trains were long (200 plus cars) and sometimes had as many as five engines. In spite of the noise of the trains, our stay in Chappell was great fun. The little town was neatly kept and a friendly place, most of the stores in the five-block area were occupied, the RV Park was beautifully maintained, and we blundered into a delightful annual pageant at a nearby park.

The second night we were there we had a storm move through – radar was showing yellow, orange, red, and pink – and as in Coleman, TX, the cloud-to-cloud lightning was spectacular. Hail had been predicted though thankfully absent, but the wind was ferocious – even Rich looked startled a couple of times, when it was hitting us broadside and rocking the RV as though it were a boat. The storm passed after a couple of hours and the morning dawned clean and bright.

Cabela's Flagship Store

We went to Sidney to grocery shop in the morning and found a huge new Cabela’s (hunting and fishing outfitter) store. It is the home office of the chain and in Chappell there are several Cabela stores which are run by brothers of the sporting goods owner.

While we were wandering around Chappell, we noticed a sign in an insurance office window that advertised the 21st Annual Ash Hollow Historical Pageant, which celebrates the pioneering spirit of those who traveled West on the Oregon Trail. Rich went inside and talked with the agent who gave him all the info, and we decided to go.

Old Stone Schoolhouse built in 1903 in Ash Hollow

We headed out to the Ash Hollow State Park around 3, drove about 20 miles through flat farmland and a huge feedlot (we’d smelled it at the campground when the wind was wrong, but up close and personal - it was overwhelming). As we got closer to the park the terrain changed to hilly and a lush green, with limestone outcroppings, canyons, juniper and yucca. It reminded us of a combination of New Mexico and Texas, but with rain.

Archaeological excavations in Ash Hollow indicated that early man used the area as much as 6,000 years ago, and a cave near the visitor’s center was used by Plains Indians for about 3,000years. The small museum at the visitor’s center boasts bones of prehistoric rhinoceros, mammoths, and

mastodons as well as pioneer history displays.

View from the top of Windlass Hill

The part of the park I was especially interested in was the history of the westward-bound pioneers. The California-Oregon Trail runs through the area and we saw a small rock schoolhouse, a sod house, and climbed Windlass Hill (not for the faint of heart) the spot on the California-Oregon Trail where the wagon trains had to carefully creep down a very steep hill to get from the high table lands to the south into the Ash Hollow area and the North Platte River valley. Folklore has it that a windlass was used to slowly lower the wagons down, but historians have not found anything to substantiate the claim. Some folks did tie ropes to the back of their wagons and used people-power to slow them; others used their oxen, and still others locked the wheels to make them slide, thus slowing them down. No matter how they chose to slow their descent, the settlers had a difficult time getting down the hill in one piece. We climbed most of the way to the top and even on the paved trail that zig-zagged up the hill, it was hard work. Rich did some calculations and concluded that the grade is 30 or 35% - some places more, some less. I found the steepness of the trail unnerving, and couldn’t even begin to imagine how the pioneers must have felt.

The valley and spring near Windlass Hill

 

After the treacherous descent, the emigrants had a difficult though fairly short haul through a sandy trail to the main campground for the night. They were rewarded by a beautiful valley with a sweet, fresh spring which supplied all the water they needed. In fact, the spring at Ash Hollow was listed in guide books of the day as the best water on the trail. It must have been a nice change from the muddy and otherwise polluted river water they and their animals had been drinking.

The celebration was held in the same valley and spring area the emigrants spent time making repairs

to their wagons. After the difficulty of the descent, then the hard pull through the sandy terrain, the lush valley and pure spring must have been a blessing indeed. It is a beautiful and peaceful area and as I stood in line for our “chuck wagon” dinner, I imagined the women lighting fires on which they would be cooking and washing clothes; the men repairing wagons and tack, and perhaps doctoring the horses or oxen; and the children filling the water barrels, collecting wood for the fires, and feeding the animals. A part of me wishes I could have been there during that time, but a bigger part is very happy that our team of oxen is a diesel truck and our prairie schooner is an air conditioned travel trailer!

The “chuck wagon” dinner consisted of large roasts of beef, slow-cooked on big B-B-Que units with constantly turning spits. Once the beef was done, it was removed from the spit and pulled apart, then served with fry bread and honey, beans (similar to the churro beans we had in New Mexico rather than the baked beans we think of), and a delicious cole slaw with tomatos, corn, peppers, cucumbers, red and green cabbage, and carrots in a wonderfully tangy dressing. The meal was $10 each (well worth the price) and we had a number of delightful locals join us at our table, two of whom took part in the program  another of our table mates, told us her grandmother came to the area via a wagon train with her family when she was nine, camped in the same area the celebration was held, and the family settled in Llwewllyn instead of moving on with the rest of the train.

Sunset on the way back from Ash Hollow

which began after dinner. Sherilynn,

The program was taken from diaries of pioneers and explorers of the time and the cast was dressed in costumes of the period, with songs of the period thrown in. All-in-all, it was a delightful time.

We stayed six nights at Chappell (it took four before the trains stopped waking me up at night) and then headed out for our one-night stand at Pawnee State Recreation Area near Lincoln on our way to Iowa to see our friends, Sue and Jim. Sue worked at QTP when I first started at the university. 

Pawnee SRA was a beautiful spot, but the sites were close together and small. It worked for a short time but doubt that we’ll be back for a long stay.

South Meadows Campground, Pike National Forest, Woodland Park, CO May 30 – June 10, 2013

The drive from Las Vegas was longer than our usual two or three hours and it was windy the entire way. Rich had a workout just keeping us in our own lane, especially once we reached the mountains.

Shortly out of Las Vegas, I saw pronghorns in pastureland – some on each side of the road; another first for me. I had to look them up in a reference book to find out what they were… Rich said the pastures are usually lush green but because of the extended drought, they were mostly brown.  Gradually we saw mountains in the distance and as we drew closer saw that many of them were still snowcapped. We were in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and they were like I’d never seen before: rocky and rugged with twisty roads and drop-offs that had me holding my breath. In spite of that, I found them beautiful, and we stopped,

at Raton Pass (7,835 feet) at an overlook (we were at 6,000 feet at Tetilla Peak) and I actually felt dizzy when we got out at the pull out. The pass was on the Mountain Trail part of the Santa Fe Trail and I couldn’t imagine traveling through this in a horse, mule, or oxen-pulled wagon.

The farther we go in Colorado, the more beautiful it gets. In fact, as we neared Pike National Forest, I was reminded of the book from

my childhood, Heidi. The lush, green mountain valleys, the rocky peaks so far above, and a quiet beauty that belied the busy little tourist town of Woodland Park we were about to pass through.

We arrived at the campground tired out and were unhappy to see that the site we had reserved was impossible for us to get into. After looking around, it was obvious this wasn’t friendly to RVs with slides. Happily, there weren’t many sites taken so we were able to find one that would work for us.

We were treated to our first dry camping and pit toilets of the trip, and our first time ever of camping at a place that didn’t have a dump station. We also found that sometime since last summer a rodent chewed the fresh water filler hose so we reverted to carrying gallon jugs of water from a  spigot, a la

tenting. Thank goodness the weather was cool enough that we didn’t miss the air conditioner, although there were several mornings when a little heat would have been welcome.

In spite of all that, the location was beautiful – a forest of Ponderosa pine trees, which give off a unique aroma – very different from any other forest we’ve been in. The Ponderosa pine grows up to 150 feet in height and four feet in diameter. As the tree

matures, the large chunks of bark turn from a grayish-black to a dull orange-red color, and once a tree is over 80 years old, the bark gives a distinct butterscotch aroma when scraped (made me hungry for vanilla ice cream). Many of the trees we saw were well over 100 feet tall, but none over about two and a half feet in diameter.

In addition to dry camping, we had no cell or data coverage (nor could we get anything on the weather radio), so Rich went back to town to get some groceries, a battery for the RV, and check the weather.  While there, he heard Gainesville had a 50% chance of getting a tropical storm. We kept our fingers crossed on that one. (Happily, although there was a lot of rain, the winds
didn’t amount to much.)

We had arranged to take the cog railway (the world’s highest) up Pike’s Peak our first full day there and what a trip that was! When we left the railway station in Manitou Springs (elevation 6,571 feet) it was sunny and in the high 70’s. I felt foolish with my long-sleeved shirt and carrying my heavy jacket, especially when I saw many folks in shorts, but knowing how easily I get cold, I kept it with me. As we climbed, the scenery changed from the fir,

spruce, and pine forests to sparsely forested areas with rocky outcroppings, to tundra and snow. At the summit, 14,110 feet, it was 27 degrees with a 60 mph wind for a wind chill of -7 degrees. Boy, am I glad I had my coat!

We disembarked and once we stepped from the shelter of the

restaurant/gift shop, were immediately assaulted by the ferocious wind which turned my nose red and cold within minutes. Rich and I walked around the area and tried to get photos of the area but it was difficult with the wind and extreme cold.

The trip up took an hour and we were at the top for 20 minutes

before we started down again. Apparently, altitude sickness can set in after 30 minutes or so, hence the fairly short stop on top. Once back inside the railway car we warmed up quickly in spite of having no heat – just being out of the wind was a blessing. I can’t imagine living in those kinds of conditions, even when I complain about the Florida heat.

Katharine Lee Bates, English teacher at Wellesley College from 1885 – 1925, wrote the poem “America the Beautiful” after a trip up Pike’s Peak by wagon in the late 1800’s. She received a small sum upon its publication in 1895 and it was the only compensation she ever received.

Pike’s Peak is omnipresent in the surrounding area and until you get back into the mountains beyond our camp, is visible. It is truly larger than life.

We enjoyed walks in the forest, wandered around the nearby lake, and generally relaxed. Rich got a two-day fishing license and caught his limit of trout in the lake two days in a row, we found a wonderful place for lunch called “Margo’s Vienna Beef Station”, and went to the Garden of the Gods.

The Garden of the Gods was privately owned until upon the owner’s death, it was given to the city of Colorado Springs by his children in 1909. According to his wishes, admission is free to visitors, although donations are happily accepted.  It is a large piece of property full of breath-taking scenery and over 15 miles of paths and was named a National Natural Landmark in 1971.

According to Wikipedia the garden is made up of “ancient beds of red, blue, purple, and white sandstones, conglomerates, and limestone that were deposited horizontally but have now been tilted vertically and faulted by the immense mountain building force caused by the Pikes Peak massif.

“Evidence of past ages ancient seas, eroded remains of ancestral mountain ranges, alluvial fans, sandy beaches, and great sand dune fields can be read in the rocks”, and in 1878, the bones of dinosaur speices Therophytalia kerri was found.

The Garden of the Gods is truly a fascinating place and we’ll plan on stopping again to get some additional education on the area.

In driving to the Garden of the Gods, we passed a little goldenrod colored building on the side of the road that proclaimed itself “Margo’s Vienna Beef Station”. Rich immediately said he wanted to stop there for lunch, and said they had great sandwiches. Now, I can’t say that overly excited me, since I’m not too fond of deli-type food, but  We went back two times before we left, and I was a fan! The Philly steak sandwich was better than we got in Philly, and even the hot dogs were tasty. I can’t wait to find another spot like it!

agreed to try it. We stopped and got an Italian beef sandwich, wet, and a gyro, and I can honestly say the gyro is the best I’ve ever eaten. I found the Italian beef a bit salty, but since I use very little salt, it was probably just me.

We had hoped to get up to the Rocky Mountain National Park, but there were no sites available and we didn’t want to have to just

drive up and back in a day, so will save that for next time. Since our time was getting short, we turned east when we reluctantly left Colorado and began our drive toward New York. We decided to stay north of Kansas and Oklahoma due to the horrible tornadoes they had been experiencing, so my next new state: Nebraska.