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Our Camping Adventure USA Style |
| Hi everybody, I'm typing this on our laptop computer, and then a nice man at the mobile home dealership near our campsite will let me connect to Muscanet and send this. At least, that's what I hoped I could do. Unfortunately, when I tried to dial in using our AT&T credit card, I could hear the voice saying that the number was invalid. We haven't used the credit card since we got our cell phones. But I'll keep looking for a way to dial our ISP on the road. So now I'm sending this from our computer at home. The message is as of Saturday, June 2. I'll send more later. We got started Thursday, May 24, and got to a little town in western Michigan. We tried to turn the furnace on, and nothing happened. No problem, we have an electric heater that we can run when we're hooked up to electric power. Next day we got into Canada. We tried to find our way using AAA Map and Go. Street Atlas USA, true to its name, has no information for Canada. We found out that Map-and-Go didn't have a lot of detail for Canada, and what it had had little to do with the real world. So we finally bought some maps and found our way around Ontario the old-fashioned way. The weather on our trip so far has been lousy. Cold and rainy. We found our campsite at Wheatley Provincial Park. A real nice secluded spot with trees all around. Unfortunately, we didn't see an electrical hookup. Because our van battery isn't strong enough to power the electric heater, it looked like we were in for a cold night. But I studied the info booklet the camp gave us, and saw that campsite #97 had the electric symbol. So at 10:00 PM, 1 hour before the office closed, we drove to the campsite office, and a couple of rangers came out and helped us find our electrical hookup, way back in the poison ivy and dear ticks. We needed almost the whole length of the 50-ft extension cord. |
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We went to
Pt. Pelee National Park a couple of times during the next week.
We went on one early-morning bird hike, and we had a good guide and saw
interesting things like a blue-gray gnatcatcher nest, and we watched the
parent birds fly back and forth to it. We were both too tired to spend any
more time at the park that day, and I had left my field guide back at
camp. We were also both coming down with super chest colds, which kept us from doing as much as we might have. We went out to Pt. Pelee again a couple of days later. We took a shuttle bus farther than they let cars go, then we walked on about half a mile of sand and gravel to the very end of the peninsula, the farthest south mainland of Canada. We saw some shorebirds and gulls, many of which I couldn't identify. We stopped at a snack bar on the way back, still in Pt. Pelee Park, and sat at a picnic table eating nachos. A female red-winged blackbird stole one from in front of our noses! I didn't see all the warblers and stuff at Pt. Pelee that I wanted to. It might be because it's past the main migration season, or maybe we didn't get up early enough. Or maybe I'm just no good at seeing birds. We also walked around Wheatley Provincial Park. On the last morning we were there, Gerry went to the men's showers to shave. But he decided the snake he saw draped over 3 of the sinks needed to wash his face more than Gerry needed to shave. While we were in Canada, Gerry picked up 23 cans of Habitant Pea Soup. We can't find that in the USA anymore. On Thursday, May 31, we left Canada and headed for Donegal, Pennsylvania. There must be about 30 A-liners at this campground! We've been comparing notes with all the other A-liner owners. Last night, Friday, Gerry cooked his special stew for the pot luck. It's a good thing we had a roofed pavilion. We had one heck of a rainstorm. Today, Saturday, we went on a tour of the A-liner factory in Mammoth. I'll try dialing in now, and we'll tell you more later. Sue - (USA) |
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Entrance to Mammoth Cave |
| Hi, Gerry here. We left the A'liner rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, June 3, & drove to a small private campground in Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, Ohio. The place was surprisingly "woodsy" and a creek ran behind our campsite. Monday, we drove to the Mammoth Cave area. During the last hour of our interstate highway driving, I was moving at 40-45 mph because of some extremely heavy rain. We stayed at "Singing Hills", a private RV campground located about a 12 minute drive from the Mammoth Cave National Park visitor center. The campground was nothing special; we picked it because of it's proximity to the caves and its relatively low price. We visited Mammoth Cave both Tuesday and Wednesday. http://www.nps.gov/maca/ |
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My camera worked perfectly OK at the surface, but I could not get it to
function properly in the dim artificial light in the cave. It simply
refused to take any photos with exposure times longer than a fraction of a
second, and the flash also didn't work. I'd just put a fresh battery
in the camera, but perhaps the battery was bad???? Bummer! So
I couldn't get any cave pictures. So we bought a bunch of post
cards. Tuesday, we hiked around above ground for about 2 hours. Very hot and humid. The place is very green, and every exposed rock and fallen log seems to be covered with moss and lichen. We saw a deer cross our path about 20 feet away. We then went on the "Mammoth Passage Tour", which starts at the "historic", "natural" entrance to the cave system. Huge passageways. Not any of the cave "decorations" which most folks expect. Nice walk. This tour is listed as "moderately strenuous", and seemed much easier than the hiking we'd done on the surface, so we bought tickets to the "Frozen Niagara Tour" (strenuous, 2+ hours) for the next day. Wednesday, we slept late and then went over to the cave for the "Frozen Niagara Tour". >>> If any of you ever visit the cave, I HIGHLY recommend this tour, which was really spectacular. <<< Current price for adults is $8. Although it's listed as "strenuous", nearly anyone can make it OK. An 11 year old kid was just fine, and I was also fine, in spite of the fact that I had some stiff muscles in my left ham (above the thigh) and in my left ankle. The pace was slow, and all the stairways had one or two hand rails. Even if you have a bum leg, the hand rails let you use your arms to pull yourself up and lower yourself gently, so you don't even have to put much stress at all on a bum leg. |
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Thursday, we hitched up the trailer and stopped by Kentucky Down Under for
a few hours before we left the area.
http://www.kdu.com/
It's a little pricey at $16 for adults, but there's a lot of stuff to see
and do. We did not bother going on the cave tour, but spent most of
our time watching a trained sheep dog in action herding sheep; feeding
lorikeets & having them sit on our arms, hands, & heads;
seeing a bunch of other birds native to Australia; looking at an Emu and some kangaroos and a few dingoes; petting a Joey who had just recently left his mum's pouch, etc., etc. By the way they make their own fudge on the premises, and it is good! I think kids in particular would enjoy a visit to this place. There are a lot of opportunities to pet some of the animals, and you can even learn how to milk a cow. We then drove to a commercial RV campground in Indiana, close to Illinois. Next day, we drove home. By the way, it actually did rain every one of those days, Sunday through Friday. Wednesday, we were in the cave and missed a heavy rain storm on the surface. Friday, the last day, it only sprinkled on our windshield for a few minutes. So, from Thursday, May 24 through Friday, June 8, the only day when we didn't have any rain at all was Wednesday, May 30, when we were in Wheatley Provincial Park in Ontario. Gerry - (USA) |
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21-Jan-03
