Home is headed for WI for a few more weeks

It used to be that as a trip was coming to an end I'd think about "heading for home." But since "home" (in the phraseology of the RVers) is "where you park it," I have to say where "home" is heading. And right now, we are headed back to Wisconsin for about three more weeks of this fall.

We have kids with birthdays and anniversaries and we want to see the.m and we want to see the grandkids. We also have some Red Cross training to take. And a doctor's appointment and ... Well, you get the idea. There is unfinished business. Isn't that always true in life? As long as we are living, there is some kind of "unfinished business" to be taken care of. So we're going to take care of some of it and, I'm sure, will leave some of it unfinished for the next time we're in WI.

Let me bring you up to date on the peregrinations of Forrest and Mary. When I last left you, we were at the Elkhart Campground in Elkhart, IN. And a delightful place it was and we'll stop there again (probably in a couple of days). However, we left Elkhart on the morning of Sept. 16 with plans for a short day's drive. We were stopping at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.



Some of are old enough to remember when the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland would catch on fire and burn. Yes, the river would burn! There was so much flammable pollution in the river (or on the surface of it) that the river would catch on fire and burn for days. Today, the Cuyahoga River and the Valley along it is a beautiful national park! The valley and river have been cleaned up and the river is clear and clean.

We weren't planning an extended visit to the park. It is long and narrow and could easily take several days to explore. It would be fun to take a LONG walk along the Ohio and Erie Towpath Trail which follows along the route of the Ohio and Erie Canal, a vital transportation link in the pre-Civil War days in Ohio, enabling canal boats to take cargo and passengers to Lake Erie from towns along the length of the canal all the way down to the Ohio River.

We stopped at the Boston Store Visitor's Center near Peninsula, OH. There we had an interesting discussion with a volunteer about the role of bats in the Cuyahoga Valley, saw some static displays on the history of canal boat building, and walked a 1/2-mile or so along the Towpath Trail. A Monday in September was definitely NOT the best time to be visiting this park. They were already cutting back on services and activities in preparation for fall and winter when the number of visitors greatly declines. However, we agreed that this park will be on our "list" for a revisit during some summer trip through northern OH.

The "list" grows longer daily. There is always so much more to see than we allow time to see it. But as we slow down and stay places longer we know that we'll take some items off of that list as we take the time to thoroughly explore an area. Like many newbie full-timers, we are busy going instead of taking time to sit. By the way, we KNOW that it costs a lot less to sit and explore than it does to drive from place to place and just get a glancing look at an area, but we are trying to be certain places on certain days this fall and that means we have to keep moving.

After our visit to CVNP, we stopped for the night in Brunswick, OH, at Willow Lake Park. It was an okay place to stop for the night, but I'm not sure it will be very high on the list of campgrounds we revisit. However, that may not be very fair to the park since a quick overnight spot is definitely not the best way to judge a campground. It was pleasant enough but, I admit, failed to make enough of an impression on me that I even remembered its name. I had to go back and look it up to write this post.

On September 17, we drove from Willow Park to Evergreen Lake Park in Conneault, OH, stopped overnight and then headed on across the little part of Pennsylvania that was on our route before we pointed our RV across the Southern Tier Expressway in New York state. There were several things in the vicinity of Evergreen Lake Park that we could have taken the time to see, but we had decided that we wanted to move on into New York and maybe get to Glens Falls a day earlier than we had planned so we could do some more things in that area. Northern Ohio definitely has some interesting places that we want to see in the future so we'll just keep on adding to the ever growing "list" of places we'll return to investigate in more depth.

I'll leave you there for the moment and continue the journey later as we travel across southern New York.