It was a dark and Stormy Night! Not really -- Just Small Adventures in Pennsylvania and New York

On a dark night near Harrisburg, PA, we pulled onto the shoulder of I-81 and watched our odometer turn to 100,000 miles. It felt like a Van-Life milestone.  We high-fived Baby Beluga and ourselves, and continued on our way. 

We had visited Carlisle, Pennsylvania and from there took a 4 day trip to cover the 159 miles to Ithaca, New York. We  attended a 4-day conference at Cornell, Bill's alma mater, and then returned to Carlisle.  The trip turned into a series of small adventures. 

We began at Ringing Rocks County Park in eastern Pennsylvania, near Jim Thorpe. The attraction? A field of boulders that, when struck, claimed to respond with a sound like the single ring of a bell. So, armed with our own hammer, we set out to see what all the fuss was about. Some rocks rang, others delivered a thud.

We learned interesting things from the park and its literature. This type of boulder field is called a felsenmeer. It formed during the Ice Age, when repeated freeze-thaw cycles caused the bedrock to crack. Over eons, weathering and erosion stripped away the soil and broke the fractured bedrock into boulders. The rocks thus formed somehow contain internal stresses that cause them to vibrate “like a guitar string” when struck. Those that are more loosely supported by the surrounding boulders are more likely to ring than to thud.

Making a rock ring like a bell is strangely satisfying!

The more we travel, the more we're awed by the geology of our planet.

We also learned how hard it is to scramble over so many boulders.  The boulder field is 7+ acres and 10 feet deep.   Ankles beware! 

We pay an annual fee to a camping organization called Harvest Hosts, and that gives us access to a huge network of businesses, farms, distilleries, breweries, and other places willing to let us park overnight on their premises. In return, they get new customers (us). The arrangement works quite well, and we often meet interesting people doing interesting things we would otherwise never have experienced.  We used Harvest Host sites for this trip: 

Penn Forest Volunteer Fire Company #1

A rural sort of place with a very active company.  The firefighters let us watch their training to find people in smoke-filled buildings.  It's quite interesting to see  firefighters  crawling into all that smoke in full gear.  (It's not real smoke).

McGrath's Pub and Eatery, Dalton, PA.
We know lots of people enjoy their neighborhood pubs, but we don't have such a spot.  So parking overnight in a park-adjacent small-town, crowded, tavern brought some interesting people watching, loud juke-box music, and a bit of a different way of life than we have.  It looks more fun.

Birdseye Hollow Farm and Distillery, Hammondsport, NY

Corning Glass Museum in Corning, NY was between McGrath's Pub and Hammondsport.  So we stopped.

No Corning Ware or Pyrex has been made there since 1999, so you can't see that at the Corning museum anymore, but you can see lots of beautiful blown glass and you can learn about the 3600 year history of glass.

A glass blowing demonstration resulted in a beautiful footed vase that was then sold in the museum's gift shop.  This fellow has blown a small circle of glass that now must be heated in a 2000 degree F oven:

Here's the opposite view of the same process seen by a camera inside the oven.  The camera image is projected outside onto a screen and that's what we photographed. There's no smoke involved but there are a lot of mirrors.

The real question about this is how did that fellow hold on to a metal rod that he put into a 2000 degree oven?  

We've all broken some glass sometime, so  watching glass break seemed like a thing to do:

A little girl in the audience volunteered to demonstrate how several types of glass break.

“Regular” glass, known as annealed glass, is what you'd typically find in picture frames and ordinary windowpanes.

We once replaced a window in our shower and discovered that building codes required us to use tempered glass. This type of glass undergoes a heat treatment that causes it to break into small pieces with relatively rounded edges rather than large, sharp shards.

Laminated glass, which is used in automobile windshields, consists of two layers of glass bonded to a plastic middle layer. When it breaks, the glass may crack into pieces, but the plastic layer holds them together so they don't scatter.

This interactive display of the periodic table lets users try different elements to create different colors in glass. 

Corning Glass museum also has a separate building where one can blow their own glass or try their hands at decorating glass, and lots of other things.  We've been there before, so skipped it this time, but it is a don't-miss.  Great cafeteria in this museum as well.

The charming town of Hammondsport consists of less than 1000 people at the tip of Lake Keuka, the shallowest and most unique of the finger lakes.  Or any US lake.  It flows both north and south, made possible because of its Y shape. 

You can see the shape of the lake -- the main flow of the lake is from south to northeast, and that's true for all of the finger lakes except for the western arm of this lake.  It flows northwest to south before joining the main current to the Northeast.   You can also see two of the ten other finger lakes in this view -- Seneca lake in the center of the picture and Cayuga Lake on the right of the picture. We spent the next five nights at our next Harvest Host location overlooking Cayuga. 

The native Seneca originally settled this land.  When  European settlers arrived, they deemed the region perfect for growing grapes, and so they did.  And that's how Hammondsport lays claim to the first bonded winery in the US, The Pleasant Valley Winery.  It is a town with a sense of calm that draws you in, shown here in another of my stolen-from-the-Internet drone pictures. 

But we were not settling with any of the now 200+wineries -- we just went right to a distillery:

The Birdseye Hollow Farm and Distillery is a little outside of  Hammondsport on 7 acres of Maple Trees mixed with some pine.  It invites you into a lovely 'tasting room' with the actual distillery housed in the grey tower on the right of the picture.

It is a small family-run operation that began as a maple sugaring farm and then added distilling to their processes. We sat at the bar (the better to talk with those in the know) in the tasting room, ate some great pizza, and  learned that they also make bourbon maple syrup.  This is simply an added step that lets the syrup sit in the used bourbon barrels before it is bottled and sold.  Tasty!

Note Baby is parked  in a web of blue conduits that ran from their almost 2000 maple tree taps to their sugar house.  We didn't see the actual process because we were there in the Fall, but would love to go back in March, when the syrup collecting is actually done.  

Glenwood Farms, Ithaca, NY
We spent five days attending a conference at the Statler Hotel on the Cornell Campus in Ithaca.  But the hotel couldn't park Baby Beluga anywhere we could still sleep in her over night.  Glenwood Farms, only three miles from the campus,  let us stay all five nights of the conference.  (Our Harvest Host membership only provides us with one night).  The farm, high on a hill, showed us lovely sunrises over Cayuga Lake.  

The conference was about something we've come to believe in deeply, and that is that living a whole food plant based lifestyle is the healthiest way to live for us and for the planet.  Just call us Plant-Powered-People.  It was a great five days.

And maybe the best adventure of all, our good friend Diane from our Prime Hook days has a summer home not far from Cornell, near Seneca Lake, and we enjoyed  an afternoon with her.  We sat on her lovely porch drinking iced tea and had a late lunch with her at an Amish Farm -- so many small adventures.

For now,  we are settling into our annual Marathon Month (October) We'll stay in our Virginia house, pamper Baby Beluga and catch up on any medical/dental things we may need to do. Then  Bill will run the Marine Corps Marathon at the end of October before we get back on the road.  

We  will  venture each week to Carlisle, PA, to watch our next generation runner -- that's our grandson William -- run in his middle school Cross Country meets. (For this age, 12,  the course is 2 miles long and so far, all on grass.) Here he is leading this pack of runners.  

All that running must make him hungry.  He had a single serving rotisserie chicken for dinner.

Because we will spend significant time in Carlisle, PA, we explored some.  It has its charm.  Son #4 will be there for a year at the US Army's war college housed in Carlisle Barracks as he prepares for future leadership roles in the Army.  It is the second oldest (after West Point) military installation in the United States, dating from 1757.  Besides Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle is home to Dickinson College, a private liberal arts college on a pretty campus on the west edge of town.  

We've done a couple of things in Carlisle besides watch William run :

We've discovered that the local Costco has reasonable parking, is not crowded and we can pay without spending an afternoon in a check out line.  All Right!

Despite Costco, Molly Pitcher is Carlisle's claim to fame, so named because she and other wives followed their husbands as they fought the British in the Revolutionary War. One of their actions was to carry pitchers of water to keep the cannons cool. Molly became famous for doing just that under heavy British fire during the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey.

She may not have been a single, real person, but rather a composite figure created to honor the many women who followed the troops and helped the revolutionary cause. Nonetheless, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, a Carlisle woman, is documented as having been at that battle and may well have been the actual "Molly Pitcher." It is upon her grave that this statue was erected.

Carlisle Barracks is home to the Army Heritage Center, an interactive museum where the most fun was had by descending from a height as though in a parachute while using the strings on the side to be sure the parachuter landed in a safe place.

For reasons still unclear to us, we attended a parade in Carlisle of 500+ Corvettes.  All years, colors, and all beautifully restored .

And because we can't resist, here's about half of our immediate family:  L -> R.  Bill, Mark, Michael, Lindsay, William.  Michael (gray shirt) is the war college attendee.  

  

VOYAYA