Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 9

Wednesday, April 16

It was still awfully cold in the morning but not so windy. The Tree Swallows were clamped tightly onto wires, puffed up and hunched over.  Not happy. The bluebird was out hunting but I noticed him ducking for the house.

Our unhooking and dumping went easily, but we were trying to kill time so as not to get to The Bellefonte before check-in time at three p.m. We had a four-hour drive with a fuel stop, so it should have been good to leave at ten, and that’s what we did.

 But it wasn’t good. Despite the Pennsylvania hills and the deluge of truck traffic on the roads, we were still running a half-hour early when we got close. We tried stopping at a rest area, but the truck parking was full. We parked on the side of the road because at least three other trucks were doing it too, and made a quick pee stop and 9-minute dog walk out of it.

Also to make the drive miserable, my right leg and hip were killing me. At some point I noticed that my vents were closed and even though Ed had the heat turned on I wasn’t getting any. When I opened my vents up and got my leg warmed up, the pains disappeared. Sadly, he turned the heat back down later (he’s the driver and needs to be comfortable), so I was freezing and in misery again for most of the drive. To make matters worse, when we stopped for fuel we noticed that it was spitting snow at us. Snow!  In mid-April, ugh!

It spit snow again when I was walking Molly at the rest area, and I noticed that some of the trees had little pockets of snow up in the branches. Double Ugh.

We’ve never been stupid again to attempt to go width-wise through Pennsylvania, west to east.  The mountains are big, the river valleys scenic, the gorges wild and wonderful. But the driving stinks. Pretty place but I wouldn’t want to drive through it.

The campground at Bellefonte is all automated and self-serve and the web site worked beautifully, but the campsite is severely weird. It’s tucked next to another site and appears to be sharing water with it. The other site’s driveway is very short and opens off ours, and even though nothing bigger than a Casita or camper van would fit in it, with the way our Jeep hangs off a person would be seriously challenged backing into it. However, the campground is not very crowded at all and I really doubt anyone will try to come in there. If they do, we’ll have to move the Jeep.

 REVIEW: The Bellefonte site 65

Very pretty but topographically challenged

Pretty much all the sites were unlevel, ours very much so, but we’re talking Western Pennsylvania in the mountains, of course.  It’s really a very pretty place on the side of a hill.  I’m not sure if you could get a 45-foot motorhome up there, but I saw some large fifth wheels. The roads are all nice hard gravel.

The sites are a little too close together for my taste; ours was so close to the one beside it that if someone had come in, we’d have had to unhook our Jeep to let them back in. We shared a water connection with that site but there was a splitter on it.

The park had a nice little playground and basketball court. If only there had been a dog park it would have been perfect for us.

All of the reservation process, check-in, check-out and finding the site was done by email and text—we never talked to a human being.  The office was closed when we arrived at about noon, but it looked like it opened later in the day. We didn’t need any help so we didn’t go by.

 There was some road construction on the road coming in, but other than a short wait for a guide vehicle, we didn’t have any problems.