Take You Ridin' in My Car, Car

I love to travel! I love being home too tho there is just something exilireating about being on the open road. Since M is now a travelin' man we have some nice opportunities to get out and see what the world has to offer. This past weekend we headed off to Bloomsburg, PA. Bloomsburg is northeast of Harrisburg and pretty much out in the middle of nowhere (no offense to the middle of nowhere as we live there too!). A nice little college town that was full of wonderful weather and pleasant people. We intended to see lots of historical things over the weekend as we had our pick of places that were close: Philadelphia, New York City, D.C. We chose Gettysburg for our first day. Another lovely little town. It was somewhat cold and overcast and, as in everything, we were on a budget so we purchased a '2 hour tour' CD and had quite a nice afternoon driving the battlefields and stopping at our leisure. The boys liked Devil's Den the best. Pretty much just a big boulder field where the southern snipers kept the nearby union forces at bay til the end of the battle.

We decided to head to Philly for the weekend. Here we saw once again how Homeland Security is wasting our tax dollars! After standing in line for 1 1/2 hours to see the Liberty Bell we realized the hold up was for security! Big signs everywhere about what is not allowed inside. Now I am all for watching out for suspicious characters and such but the process by which they do this is ridiculous. Of course, it hadn't crossed our mind we would have to be searched and M always travels with a pocket knife - or in this case 3! So while we are busily stripping off jackets and going through the metal detector our backpack sails right through without a hint of knives traveling inside. No, the security people spend an extra five minutes patting M down because the buttons on his overalls sent their detectors up a wall. But we finally did get to see the Liberty Bell and went from there to Independence Hall, Ben Franklin's musuem and Elfreth's Alley. We had planned on stopping for the evening in New Hope. In the 1920's many artists fled conservative Philly to a community more in tune to their own needs. Near here is also where Washington crossed the Deleware. We were unaware there are NO HOTELS in any of these small areas and our search for lodging for the night took us quite awys away from New Hope. Which causes us to look for other attractions the next day. We headed to Reading and found Goggleworks - a wonderful community co-op of artists. A couple of glass artists were in the glass studio and all of us were fascinated for an hour watching them make glass mugs. Definitely worth missing our planned stops. Another place we stopped in on the way home was Centralia. About 40 years ago, due to some trash catching fire, the coal mines under the town caught fire and as they were unable to put the fire out it is still burning today. The roads and driveways are still there tho most of the houses are gone. I would expect it would seem like an eerie, surreal step into the Twilight Zone if one didn't know the history of the 'town'. If you follow the link you will see a picture of the town 'today'. I am not sure when 'today' was tho I can say not even that little bit is left now.

Monday we the boys and I headed off to see a few covered bridges. Being that we have one covered bridge near us I had always assumed there were few left. Guess maybe that is only around here as there are 24 just in the county where M was working! We managed to see a handful including the only twin covered bridges left in the country. I should say they 'were' as one had been demolished in a flood this past summer. The county is in the process of deciding if the million dollar price tag to rebuild is worth it. The coutryside is lovely there. Very neat, lots of small bedroom communities. Reminds me a little of home tho without the bigger mountains.

A couple of odd things about the area. Tho the weather was perfect all weekend we rarely saw people out and about in the small communities. No one sitting on their front porch, no one fishing on the many lakes or the rivers, no bikers. We are used to seeing people walking all over the place on beautiful fall weekends. Surely they didn't all go to the Eagles game. Another strange thing were the signs on the highways. Huge signs warning you of aggressive drivers and drunks. Everywhere you looked there was signage about these two groups of people. Made it look like PA has a corner on the market of bad drivers and one was going to jump out at you on every corner. We didn't see one.