20020510

May 10, 2002

Start: Home, Manassas, VA
End: Tri-State RV Park, Matamoros, PA
Miles: 308

Hurray!! Dolores’ vacation starts today.

She finished administering her last exam for the semester yesterday and helped me finish packing the trailer.

We finished breakfast and put the final few items into the trailer (only forgetting about five things we really wanted). We were on the road at 8:50. 

Our route took us past Gettysburg to Harrisburg PA. The roads around Harrisburg are still in their construction stage. A cartoon I saw says that the state color is orange – the color of the warning cones on the roads. To here, the roads are relatively level.

En route to Scranton, you start over the hills. Usually, you ease up one side of a ridge in a long climb. Then you scoot through the cut at the top and ease down the other side of the ridge. But there is one stretch of I-81 (the name “Frackville” comes to mind) where you ease up to the top of the ridge, then run along the top for a long ways – and it all seems uphill. Then you finally ease back down. 

It was a nice day, with a stiff breeze out of the northwest. There were many nice scenes (low mountains, valleys, the trees are greening (lots of pollen)). The long ridge, however, only had scrubby small trees along the road. The impression was that this might be the remains of some strip mining – after all, this is coal country.

Wilkes-Barre and Scranton are in the valley, so the highway threads along the side of the hill just above the cities. There are lots of roads joining and diverging from the interstate. The local minimum speed appears to be about 70mph. It’s a place to avoid at rush hour or holidays. This Friday wasn’t too bad.

Then we had more nice driving conditions over the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania to the point where it joins New Jersey and New York. We pulled into the campground at that point, on the bank of the Delaware River.

We’d had enough for the first day on the road, so we took it easy for the rest of the day. The inn in the other corner of the property was having a polka festival, which was tempting, but…. 

At bed-time, we started hearing a bumping noise we couldn’t identify. I went outside and found the wind had picked up even more and was brushing the end of a limb onto the roof and side of the trailer. I finally found a piece of line I could throw over it and drag it down. Then I snapped off the end of the limb and solved that problem.

We heard some trucks on the highway but slept fairly well.