Regarding April 27, 2010:

Yesterday (the 27th) we drove for 8-9 hours and made it out of Connecticut, through New York and into Pennsylvania. Just after crossing into Pennsylvania we stopped at a visitors’ centre in Hawley, PA. I have to say it is the best visitors centre I have ever visited. It’s new, has spacious, clean bathrooms, lots of pamphlets, free maps and friendly service. There is even a fireplace, two couches, historic pictures hanging on the wall, and a porch overlooking the river. At the visitor’s center we picked up some free Route 6 postcards and a guidebook/magazine about Route 6 and its attractions through the entire state.

Equipped with a map, we decided to take a two hour drive south OFF of route 6 to visit a ghost town, Centralia. If you haven’t heard about Centralia, you should look up more information about it. In 1962 a trash fire accidentally hit a patch of coal and set fire to the whole underground system of it running beneath the town. The fire effectively shut the town down. It's still burning to this day.

Sure enough, we saw streets overrun with weeds , sink holes, and smoke emerging from the ground in spots. Unfortunately our pictures didn’t show the smoke very well, and all the abandoned houses had been more or less torn down, not visible. There is still signs of habitation here and there and an amusing sign posted by some of the residents to the Governor of the area: "Governor Rendell - you rushed to Scauykill county to help an illegal immigrant. Why won't you help these 'american citizens' whose rights are being violated by the DCED."

When it started to snow in the late afternoon I figured we should secure our sleeping area.

When I say, “well… at least I didn’t flip out,” it means I’M FLIPPING OUT on the inside. At 6 p.m. we pulled over into a Pennsylvania State Forest to camp. It seems the PA law dictates that as long as you are 300 feet away from any water source, trail, or parking lot, you are able to primitive camp for free for one night in state forest land. “I think we qualify as primitive camping,” I say. And boy did we ever! The cat, Matthew and I cramped ourselves into a pup tent with three sleeping bags, a body pillow, a litter box and several sweaters. It was below freezing outside and just at freezing in the tent. Even the cat, who is usually temperamental about cuddling, crawled into the sleeping bag with us and slept swished between the two of us for most of the night—a furry snake between two soft boulders.

I was petrified and bitterly cold for the first few hours in the tent. I think we all were. I was imagining these three things:

1. Waking up to a frozen stiff cat.

2. Cat scent calling ravenous wolves to our tent.

3. Bears smelling the candy in my purse or the crumbs of cat food in the tent.

4. Getting busted by the sheriff in the middle of the night.

5. Torrent rains.

6. Snakes biting through the bottom of the tent.

And, 7. being unable to get out of the tent because the long drive and hard ground bed reactivated my sciatica to monumental proportions.

Of course, in the end, none of these actually happened, although I did have a hard time getting out of the tent in the morning.

We’ve decided that whatever sleeping arrangements we’ve done thus far, we will never do again. I think we’re running out of options. This evening should prove interesting; we are going to try sleeping in the car.