I first have to tell a story. One Sunday afternoon, I was sitting at our picnic table getting the letters ready for the next update to the marquee out front. (Pictures later.) Two 10-year old girls who I've gotten to know from working in the store came walking by. Erica noticed our license plates were from Florida, so she asked if that's where we were from. I told her it was. She asked me "isn't it annoying to drive up here from Florida ever weekend?" I nearly fell off the bench, but tried to stay composed. I explained to her that we stayed up here all the time and wouldn't go back to Florida until October. It was a logical question from her - just about everyone at this park comes up for the weekend and then goes back home during the week. It still tickles me. She was so cute. "Out of the mouths of babes."
We are earning our keep. Most of my time is still spent in the store. We've got a schedule of 12 hours on the weekends. I work most of that, Julian spells me for lunch and potty breaks. He does several hours of mowing, too. We also keep the marquee up to date at the entrance to the park. I get the letters ready on Sunday, then we post the new info on Monday on our way to take our walk. Here's a picture of me "at work" a couple weeks ago.
On that same morning walk, we stopped to get a picture of some awesome rhododendron bushes. I tried to get Julian to stand by them for perspective, but he wouldn't have it. So I did the job so that you can see how huge they were.
Up until last Monday (6/22) we've had rain nearly every day. We took one of the "partly sunny" days to drive out east to just explore. We took PA-590 all the way to Lackawaxen on the Delaware River which separates Pennsylvania from New York. We circled around and came back to Hawley where we had lunch. We drove around Lake Wallenpaupak after talking to the Information guy. The lake is good for fishing, but you pretty much have to have a boat. (That lets us out!)
From there we went south to Promised Land State Park. The lake here was much smaller than Wallenpaupak and had a really nice picnic area and access to shore fishing.
This next picture was also taken at Promised Land and demonstrates how huge the trees are around here. At the base of that tree is a pavilion with a bunch of picnic tables inside. It looks so tiny next to those trees.
We haven't returned to Promised Land, but we will I'm sure. We could take Heidi and a picnic lunch and spend some quality fishing time there.
A couple days later, we had a day that wasn't too bad, weather-wise. So we went into Scranton and took the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour. Most coal mines are now closed, this one shut down in 1966. They've been running tours almost ever since. And it was a really interesting tour. It was an incredibly dangerous place to work, especially in the early days. Lots of men and boys died in those caverns. This is the shaft that took us 300 feet underground for the tour.
I've mentioned we brought our Wii on the trip. We've gotten to where we'll bowl a few games just about every evening before dinner. On the same day as our mine tour, we bowled for a bit as usual. Julian was HOT! He bowled this nearly perfect game.
At the time, that was my highest game as well. I've since gotten a 266 as my high. It's funny that now we can't be satisfied if we don't get over 200 on a game. In real life, I'm happy to hit 130.
And it's almost time for today's "sports hour", so I'll stop here for today. We are doing fine. The sunnier days of the past week have helped a bunch. I'll be working on Catching Up, Part 2 very soon.
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