Campground at Manheim, PA

The rain finally stopped so that I could get outside and take some pictures of the campground.
Pinch Rd. Family RV Resort, is just as it sounds.  It's geared toward families.  They are having competitions, games, hayrides and crafts for kids, every Saturday, geared around Halloween.  The biggest drawback to this place, is the fact that it is a bit far from town.  From anything, in fact.   There is a large pond here on the grounds that is stocked with trout.  We were told we could fish and keep what was caught.  The rain made that on the impossible side.  I wouldn't know what to do with a trout if I caught one!
 This is our site.  They didn't have one next to ours for the Matthews.  They are down the road about 6-7 spaces.

                                    This building below is the Game Room and Gathering Room.

This one is the office and store.  They sell some camping supplies and ICE CREAM!

                                              The rest of the pictures are just of the grounds .

                                                and a teenager riding a motor driven uni-cycle???

He steered by leaning from side to side.  It went pretty fast too!  He had no problems with the gravel either.  Looks like an accident waiting to happen, to me.  He never stepped off of it while I saw him.  I wouldn't make it a foot without falling.   I would like to know how long it took him to be able to ride that thing.   WOW!
Tomorrow we leave and head towards Virginia.
Later

A Day of Covered bridges and Amish Country

We drove to Ephrata and into the surrounding county today looking for covered bridges.  Lancaster County has 31 covered bridges.  We only went looking for 5.  The Ephrata Cloister was a religious community started in 1732 by German settlers.  It is one of the earliest in our country.

I didn't get a picture, so I borrowed this one.   http://www.ephratacloister.org  is a website with a lot of information.
We spent a lot of time being lost and accidentally finding what we were looking for.  It was an experience.  LOL

This is about as close as we got to finding Amish people.  We saw several buggies on the roads.  The horses are beautiful.

Some of the houses in this area were what I assume were row houses.  Attached and semi-attached.

One small town would run right into another without us barely noticing they had changed names.

But the farmland was large and beautiful.  

Most appeared to be dairy farms.  Someone has to furnish Hershey with milk for all that milk chocolate.

We did see some sheep, but they were all small herds.  They appeared to have been shorn recently.  I bet they were getting a little cool today.

This corn crib or what ever it's called was full of corn.  It looked dried.  I guess it was for feed.  Can you tell I'm a city girl.  Maybe it was popcorn!

 I don't know what was in those dog house looking things.  I saw several of them at farms.  We saw some animals in one of them.  Libbie said it was raccoons.  I said it was rabbits in one and chickens in another.  There is no telling what was in those dog houses.  Each one had a small fence around it.  LOL  I don't think it was fighting roosters.  Could have been I guess.  But the animals I did see weren't roosters.

 Horse and buggy waiting for driver to return.  I wanted to jump in and drive off.  LOL

                                                 Beautiful farms everywhere we went.

 We finally found our first covered bridge.  This one was Pool Forge.  It is 99' long and crosses the Conestoga stream.  This stream must be a long one because it has 6 covered bridges on it.

 You could drive through this one.  We walked thru it first.  It was built in 1859.

 That curved wide piece of wood is called a burr arch truss.  That is the type of bridge it is also.

It is painted in the traditional red but with the ends being red too.  White ends are traditional.

I don't know if this is a homestead or not.  This bridge is on private property now.  It's pretty big if it is a home.

This bridge is now being used as storage like a barn.  This is Red Run Covered bridge and was built in 1865.  It is 107' long.  It was not being given much loving care.

This bright red building was across from the bridge.  Notice the barn (I think that is what it is or was) is bigger than the house behind it.

I know it's just a clothes line.  But these two pictures are the same clothes line.  I couldn't get the whole thing in just one shot!  If you blow the top one up, you can see a pulley on the left hand side.  It is used to bring the laundry in and set it out.  Now that's a long clothes line!

This is the last bridge we found today.  This is Bucher's Mill covered bridge.  This bridge is 64' long and was built in 1892.  This was is traditional red with white ends.  It was originally built in 1891 but was damaged in a flood and was rebuilt in 1892.  It is the second shortest bridge in the county.

Where the others weren't painted on the inside this one was.  It helps you to be able to see that  burr arch truss I was talking about on the first one.
We had picked out 5 bridges to see but we were slow and it was getting dark so 3 is all we found.  But as you can see, they all look alike.  I had to take extra pictures just for reminders so I would know where I was and which bridge was which.  LOL
It was a fun day.

                                           

Hershey PA

The rain is still with us and we are watching Hurricane Joaquin, and  I do believe that it's going to miss us.  It has not stopped us from doing what we wanted, so far.  We shall see what tomorrow brings.

                             We drove into Hershey, PA today and went to Chocolate World.

We went into the tasting room and learned about tasting chocolate.  First you look at it.  It should have a shiny look to it.  Then you break it.  Dark chocolate will snap louder than milk chocolate.  Then you smell it.  And last but not least, you get to taste it.  We got to taste the raw cocao bean.  Not nearly as good as chocolate.

What you see, is what you get for $9.95 tasting tour.  Inside the paper bag were 4 small bars of chocolate.  First was dark, then milk chocolate, bliss and last but my favorite, was the Scharffen Berger milk chocolate.  Sounds European, but it's made in California and is a division of Hershey.

 We then took the factory tour, which was like a disney ride that showed how they make the chocolate in the factory.

                           It was a lot of fun and of course we came back with some chocolate.

                           Don't you just love the hershey kisses lamp shades?  Wrapped and unwrapped!

Let me Regress, Boat pictures from Niagara Falls

Libbie and I wanted to ride the boat to get close to the falls.  The guys didn't.  The fuddyduddies stayed at the campground and Libbie and I bought WEGO tickets.  WEGO is the bus system that covers most of the city of Niagara Falls.  For a mere $7.00 Canadian, we could ride as much as we wanted for 24 hours.  We rode from the campground to the boat dock to buy our tickets.
I didn't take my camera on board the Hornblower boat that took us up close to the falls.  I knew that it would get wet and was worried about ruining it so I used my phone to take pictures.

Then we were in Canada and had to watch our data usage so I didn't get them posted.  Then I forgot about them.  What can I say, I am getting on the old side.

We had a great time.  It was really beautiful and very wet.

The funniest thing happened on board though.  There was this group from Taiwan.  In this group was this young man.  He had his mini IPad and a back pack.  In the back pack he had music playing.  He danced around the boat taking a selfie video.  Dancing and pointing to the falls.  It was so funny.  Libbie and I watched him and by the time we headed back, we couldn't help it, we photo bombed him.  Libbie and I were dancing behind him, doing the same things he was doing.  It was hilarious!

We talked to him after we got off the boat.  It was his first trip to Canada and he was leaving that night.  We thanked him for letting us photo bomb him.

The picture above was taken from on top of the falls.  I have a couple from different angles.  If you fell in this water, you were going over.  It was very swift and surprisingly, not very deep.

After the boat ride, we got on a different bus route and did a little shopping and ate lunch.  There are several different routes all color coded.  We rode the red and blue route.  We started to ride them all but we wore out before we could.

It was a great day.  We had fun.  Too bad the guys didn't want to join us.
Later

On our way to PA.

When we left Niagara Falls, we had intended on driving to a campground in Mansfield, NY.  This campground was listed as a RESORT.  Everything we read about it sounded fine.  We arrived and they were closed and had a sign on the door to just find a spot and see them in the morning.  We didn't have reservations, but had called ahead to make sure they had a site for us.  We drove around the park looking at sites.  This place was not a resort.  It was a mud hole.  The music from Deliverance was playing in my mind as we drove through the place.  We like to stay at family owned parks and resorts when we can, but this was a little too rough for us.  We decided that since it was going to be a one night stop anyway, we would stay on Walmart parking lot.  I went in to make sure it was ok and the manager said fine.   It was cool so we didn't miss the electricity and our lights are battery powered.  We had water on board.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but not something I really want to do again.  We boon-docked one other time, but it was across from a baseball park, in a tiny town in OK.  We did so because we missed our turn to the campground and we were exhausted.  We were going to look for a Walmart then but our motorhome was bigger than the Walmart parking lot in this tiny town.  Anyway, back to Mansfield.  Another experience down.

This morning we left our wonderful site at Walmart and headed to Lebanon, PA.  It was a beautiful drive.

I wish it hadn't been raining.  There was a lot of fog in the area too.  We were crossing some of the Allegheny Mountains, I believe.

Between the rain and the tinted windshield, it was hard to take pictures, but I wanted to capture all the color.  There was just no way to do it justice.

 We also saw some of the Amish in their horse drawn carriages.  This was on Hwy 15.  Notice he was traveling against traffic not with it.  He had orange lights flashing on top of the carriage.  The horse was in a pretty fast trot, but not enough to keep up with the traffic.  LOL

We arrived at Pinch Pond Campground around 4:00.  I was having low blood sugar problems at that time and haven't gotten pictures of our site and the grounds.  I will get that tomorrow.  They are already gearing up for Halloween here.  It seems they decorate and have hayrides and games and competitions on best decorated sites like they do in Star City back home.  We couldn't get sites next to each other because of all the folks coming in this weekend.