Today we took off on our “Tour of the Great Lakes” adventure, planning to visit each of the 5 lakes. Tom carefully straddled the “make sure we have reservations so we don’t get stranded,” and “Let’s just wing it” divides. Scott’s son Stuart and wife Tiare had left the Jeep at the airport in Philadelphia for Steve to pick up. The plan was to have Steve bring some items we had left in Florida, join us at Scott’s airport hangar, and we would hitch the Jeep (Marco Polo) to the Winnebago (Ghengis Khan) and off we’d go. We planned to arrive at our first stop, Letchworth State Park Campground before dark – around 8PM. Alas, that was not to be.
Steve first had trouble finding the Jeep despite excellent information from Stuart and Tiare (user error on Steve’s part – he only read some of the text and SMS messages Scott sent him.) Then he couldn’t find the parking ticket (it was “too thin” for Steve to find it in the assigned location.) Nonetheless, Steve showed up only a half hour later than we planned, but we did not depart for Letchworth until 2:45PM. Then I-80 was closed due to what must have been a pretty horrific crash, and we were detoured on a circuitous route that added an hour. Despite the fastest dinner you can have with 3 cranky old guys at a Wendy’s, we got more and more behind. We decided the only thing we needed for breakfast due to Tom’s excellent shopping was butter. At the Mansfield, PA “food store” convenience mart where we filled up with diesel we discovered they had no butter – but lots of beer, cigarettes, and snack cheese. We pressed on as it rained and got darker.
We arrived after the campground office closed at 9PM, so we found our campsite and managed to get the power plugged in. Fortunately, the rain, which had been quite heavy, had stopped. We then looked for the water and sewer connections, and discovered that they had none. There are water hoses spread every 4-5 campsites, and a dump site for sewer on the way out. Not a big deal, though we would have loaded more water in PA if we had been more aware of these things. Scott discovered that the campground store and laundry was 200 yards in front of the excellent site we reserved, and the bath house was not far away. We went to bed around 10:30PM. With things cooling down we opened the windows, turned on the roof fan, and fell asleep as the temperature dropped. During the night it got pretty chilly, but we closed windows and bundled up, sleeping well.
