Originally our plan for Saturday was to swing by Canton, Ohio to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame, another of John's dream destinations. Unfortunately it happened to fall on the same day as the induction ceremonies so Canton, Ohio was the last place we needed to be visiting in our 26 foot RV. So we decided to skip that and continue on into Pennsylvania. Our idea was to find something fun to do along the way, like river tubing or canoeing. After lots of Google searches I finally found a river tubing place that was sort of on the way. We set the GPS to take us there and set off on another adventure, envisioning a relaxing float down the river.
As luck would have it, the roads to the river tubing place were long, winding and narrow and wound through several desolate, broken down towns that had seen better days. As the scenery grew more despondent we began to question our decision to embark on this latest excursion. When we finally reached the tubing place, we found a tiny, cramped parking lot full of overweight, tattooed people drinking beer from cans, definitely no kids in sight. This did not look like a family friendly venture, besides there was no good place to park the RV, so we kept on driving, apologizing profusely to the kids for having failed to produce a fun-filled final day on the road.
I give our kids a lot of credit. They could have whined about it and made a big fuss. But they both just shrugged and said they'd be happy with ice cream and to just reach our destination for the night. At that point I hastily made a call to a campground just outside of Bedford, PA and called it a day. No tubing for this family, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn't seem that important. We'd already done so much and seen so many things.
We pulled into our campground and were immediately greeted by an elderly lady who motioned for us to go knock on the door of a little house in order to check in. It became immediately clear to me that this was no ordinary campground. Instead it seemed like a retirement community of people who had parked their mobile homes a long time ago and never moved them. After writing a check to the second elderly lady who seemed to be in charge, she told me to follow the first lady in her golf cart to our camp site.
Most of the campground was made up of permanent residents as I'd suspected. But up on a little hill was a flat area with spaces for about eight RVs that was set aside for short-term stays. It was a bit of a relief to be set back from the rest of the place. We had a nice spot on the end with a view of the pool and lots of shady trees. It was quiet with not much activity, but that was ok. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing evening with our family. Hooking up the RV was rather comical since we had trouble finding the sewer hookup, but we finally located it and everything worked fine. The kids and I checked out the pool which was a little bit slimy and overlooked a weird old playground that looked like something out of a horror movie with a scary clown swing set. Then we walked down to buy some firewood from the old ladies, who let us load it up on their golf cart and drove it up the hill for us. It was a strange place but everyone was very friendly.
We ended the night with one last cookout and a very competitive game of Sorry. Lots of yelling and pounding the table ensued and Ella finally came out on top as the victorious winner. It was a great way to end our last night. I love our family game nights and we definitely had a lot of good ones on this trip.
Next: A Day of Introspection - Flight 93 Memorial and the Road Home
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