Utah - May 9, 2010

Our Campsite in Utah (Scofield State Park)

Just as the sun was beginning to peak around the horizon, I woke up shivering. The sides of the tent were wet and the damp cold had seeped through the sleeping bag.
“I’m so cold,” I said, not particularly caring if Mateo was awake to hear me, or if I’d wake him up with my complaining.
“Me too,” he replied, as if he had been awake just as long as I had, shivering and thinking about the dampness like me.
“I think I have enough room in my sleeping bag for the both of us,” I suggest. And, without hesitation Mateo attempted to climb into my sleeping bag.
I have to tell you at this point that this is a laughable thing for me to have suggested. We’re both overweight, and even two trim adults would have a hard time sharing a sleeping bag meant for one. But we somehow managed to squeeze into one sleeping bag without tearing it at the seems. The body heat instantly put me back to sleep.
When I woke up an hour later, it was because my body could no longer stand to sleep rigidly straight trapped in a skin tight bag. At this point, I didn’t care if it meant I had to get up and make the coffee in the morning cold, I had to get out of the sleeping bag (or force him out of it). So I squeezed out, sat up in the tent and soaked my sleeve on the side of tent in the process. I promptly jumped into the car and blasted the heater. It took roughly half an hour and several slow laps of driving around the RV camp for the engine to warm up enough to heat the car properly. By then Mateo had made a warm nest of three sleeping bags all to himself in the tent, and he fell back asleep for another hour. I was now wide awake and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I made coffee on the propane stove and took a shower in the bathroom meant for RV campers.
Bathing in public showers is always an adventure. First you have to find a place to put everything: your toiletries for use during the shower, the toiletries for use just after the shower, your dirty clothes, your clean clothes, your towel, AND your shoes and socks.
Then you have to make sure the door is securely shut. Usually there is some trick to lining up the lock with the latch, lifting the door slightly, or just hanging a portion of your shoe or other personal item over or under a door to indicate “occupied.”
Then you have to figure out how the shower works, which way to turn the knob for hot water, and how to avoid the stream of water until it has reached the proper temperature.
In the end I had to put all of my belongings in the spiderweb infested window sill because it turned out to be the only dry spot in the shower compartment once you have the water running for any length of time. I swear this water went uphill to soak my socks. I guess that’s the nature of showering in these kinds of places.
And let me ask you something… do you use those shower benches? I mean, other than to hold your shampoo bottle or to use to balance for washing your feet, do you actually sit your naked butt on a bench in the shower? This seems just plain wrong to me. Like the sensation of peeing with your clothes on… something your body/mind won’t let you do without some serious convincing. Especially as a female I think sitting on a wet bench is unnerving. That being said….. I do not squat over toilet seats. If the toilet seat is dry, I sit on it. I learned, from the AIDs awareness campaigns in the early 90s, that toilet seats are actually inhospitable environments for things like AIDs and such, so I go ahead and sit in peace when I pee. But sit on a bench with my bare butt?! No way!



-CB

April 28, 2010 - Pennsylvania cont.

I had no idea that it was already 9am when we finally woke up. My head was buried under inside my sleeping bag, hiding from the cold, so I thought it was still o’dark hundred. Mateo confessed he thought the same thing. Kitty was awake though. She was sitting upright on the pillow. I swear she looked just like me after an all-nighter: her hair disheveled, eyes puffy and red. I suspect that after our “there’s something outside” episode she did not go back to bed. At around midnight Kitty and I were both frightened and woke Mateo up when we heard scurrying outside. I was convinced it was a predatory animal, but somehow I was able to go back to sleep. Kitty stayed up and pulled security watch all night. So she slept like a peaceful kitten all day in the car as we traveled through Pennsylvania.
PA is picturesque. There are lots of forest lands, eagles, quaint old towns, and tourist traps centered around the mining industry and farming. We drove through rolling hills, past rotting barns, frolicking lambs and drive through liquor stores.“I always think ‘GREAT AMERICAN STEEL WORKS’ when I see these rusted and painted metal bridges. They’re works of historical art. Though I wish I could see an old wooden, covered bridge.”15 miles later we came across one.
It was clear early on that we weren’t going to make it past the PA-OH border. So, we took our time, stopping to take pictures of barns and see the Grand Canyon of PA! By late afternoon we had burned through all of our rations of random food items and didn’t have a drop left to drink, so we stopped in a SurFine grocery store for supplies. It’s amazing how easily you can spend $100, even when the store is short on what you’d consider viable supplies! (It was a small store, with a large fresh meat section, which we avoided due to lack of refrigeration.) I was able to get:
a bag of apples
grape tomatoes
salad mix
one onion
trail mix
granola
brown rice pasta
spaghetti sauce
Chef Boyardee beefaroni
Campbells Vegetable beef soup
chicken broth
Grandma Brown’s baked beans
refried beans
bean salad
canned apricots
canned tropical fruit salad
whole wheat tortillas
Polish leek sausage
Ziploc bags
New York sharp cheddar cheese
sliced Provolone cheese
Italian seasoning
a couple gallons of water
baby wipes/wet wipes
paper towels
four whole wheat bagels
jar of peanut butter
coffee
canned spinach
frozen peas

I am curious what would you have picked, considering you have limited space, only one burner and one small cooler? It needs to be enough food to last about two weeks and easy enough so that you entirely avoid eating fast food or at restaurants. I thought we could use the tortillas for sandwich wraps and burritos, instead buying bread which squishes in a packed car. I figure we’ll stop to buy fresh salad mix, ice and water every few days.
I also plan on buying chicken to cook in the broth with tomatoes, onion, peas, italian seasoning and some carrots and sweet potatoes that I already have.

After unloading the car to assist in loading all our new groceries, we attempted to find state hunting lands to camp on for the night. All of it was closed. So we parked on a dirt road and set up the kitchen to cook dinner. We felt like real “On the Road” hobos, although I’m sure none of the beatniks or hobos would have fresh sausage for dinner with their beans.

I took behind the wheel and drove us to an empty parking lot in the Allegheny National Forest a few hours away. We slept in the car and woke up with ice over all the windows (on the INSIDE and the OUTSIDE!) This time I woke us all up at 6am and got us on the road no later than 7:30am.

-CB

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.