A Trip to Ohiopyle and Fallingwater (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1

Our first night actually was fine, even if short.  The back of the bus faced the east, which meant that the sun streamed in through the trees in all the windows.  The new bench-platform bed fit a queen-sized foam pad with room to spare, and the pre-made bedroll made putting the bed together easy.  After a pot of espresso was brewed up on the stove, we started to unpack and find what we needed.

As a light rain started and slowly got heavier, I opted to put out our new (to the bus) awning, both to insure that we would have some dry area alongside the bus and because the awning had not been unrolled and exposed to a nice cleaning rain in over a decade.  It came out easily and I was able to use a cloth and the rain-water to clean the supports of the dirt and grime it had accumulated in the under-building storage it had been in.

One thing to note here was that we were in our first extended-stay non-electric sites.  Given that we’d be moving and wouldn’t be able to use the solar panels, I didn’t even bring them, and we opted to use the fridge (which had chilled on before we left and had been running off the inverter on the way down) as a cooler, opening it as little as possible to conserve cold.  But it was nice.  We still had lights with the DC when we needed them, and there was no buzz from the inverter.

The Ohiopyle Campgrounds were really nice.  There were lots of little streams and big rocks.  (Our dog liked nestling among them.)  There were tons of trees and plenty of birds, though not many animals that we saw, though we were in one of the two dog-friendly loops.  The other loops are not pet friendly, and you aren’t even allowed to walk your dog through them.  If there’s a trailhead in one of those loops, you have to drive your dog there to take them on the trail.

And there was no excess light pollution after dark.  It was really nice to be able to see the moon and stars amongst the clouds from our bed.

After a hearty breakfast, we set about some organizing.  We drove down to Ohiopyle with the bench-platform in place, and the height of the platforms means that all of the plastic totes that we have used so far slide right underneath it.  This is great because the open space is about 60 inches by 42 inches, which is a ton of space where the totes can’t bounce around in the far back of the bus.

One of the issues we had in arranging was that I haven’t yet built the under-counter storage, so everything was tucked away in the bathroom area, and we needed to be able to tuck it all back there the next morning, as we needed to take the bus to Fallingwater the next day (Two miles away as the crow flies, but eight by road) as we couldn’t leave our dog at the campsite and we didn’t bring a toad or chase vehicle.

As the day progressed, and the rain worsened periodically, it also became obvious that we needed better pre-planing.  I had checked the weather and noted that it was going to be cold and grabbed winter gear (coats, gloves, hats, scarves), but not rain gear, and the weather was still relatively warm.  Luckily the spotty rain cut out often enough that it wasn’t a big problem, but when our friends on a different loop stopped by and our son wanted to go and play with them, he didn’t have rain gear to take ‘just in case’.

(So, we’ve determined that we need a better pre-trip list, and currently everything that was packed away in the bus is now out for cataloging and sorting.)

But we were fine.  We hosted the kids from our friends’ site (they had a total of five kids) as their son remarked that we always had good games with us.  Boss Monster was the game of choice, and much fun was had by all (except the heros, of course).  But we also had brought our LEGO Fallingwater set and our Pop-up Frank Lloyd Wright book, so they were seen as well.

And for dinner, we got to christen two new toastite makers on the fire! My wife got me one years ago, and last year my wife and son decided that if I was making toastites for everyone, I wasn’t getting to eat with everyone else.  So they got toastite makers for themselves and I got to make three toastites all at once.

The night got down to 37F or so, but we were all pretty warm.  Mixed in with our blankets and bedding were blankets of reflective mylar and faux-sheepskin that we tend to call ‘magic blankets’ for just how warm they are.

The next day was classes at Fallingwater, so we had to contend with packing up in the morning.  And getting the bus there.

 

Continued in Part 3

A Trip to Ohiopyle and Fallingwater (Part 1)

So, over the last weekend we traveled to Ohiopyle, PA, as a culmination of a class our son took in understanding architecture run by the education folks at Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater

The symposium ran on Sunday for the students who took the class (a bunch in our homeschool group here in Buffalo, and some public school students from around Pittsburg) to show off the houses that they designed and built, either in model form or electronically, got a tour of Fallingwater, and then our homeschool students got a series of four additional classes on Monday.

So this trip was going to be the longest trip we’d taken in the bus, as Ohiopyle (the nearest state park with camping to Fallingwater) is about 215 miles from Buffalo as the crow flies.  I thought that it would probably be best to travel via the shortest distance rather than taking expressways that went farther out of the way, and Google maps put together a route that made the shortest distance 272 miles.  This looked even more appealing as the route passed through the territory of the Seneca Nation of Indians near Salamanca, where diesel was just over $2/gallon.

The short trip route.
The short trip route.

The route was calculated to take 5 hours and 50 minutes, but, as so often happens, it took longer.  We got out late, and as direct as that route looks on the map, it’s full of twists and turns and lots and lots of hills.

And of course, the bus has a manual transmission.

It ended up taking us 7 hours to get to the campground, more than half of that in the dark, and without high beams on, the headlights only show a short amount of the road ahead. We did drive through Pauxsutawney, and saw one of the Phil Statues (like the Herd About Buffalo) in a parking lot we paused in.

We passed over two (probably scenic) summits along the way, and we were limited to being in 3rd gear going up and fourth going down (with heavy stab braking), along with a myriad of smaller hills along the way.  The lowered speed limits, reduced visibility, and gearing/power limitations of keeping the bus at a safe speed and still making forward progress all added up to our getting in late. My shoulders ached from all the shifting with my right arm and managing turns with my left.

But checking in at the Ohiopyle State Park Campground was painless, even though we were late.  They had out a clipboard with a listing of all the sites, those reserved/occupied and the ones that were available, so that people could check in or ‘take’ an unoccupied site and settle accounts in the morning.  I circled our reservation, and we made our way to the site.

As nice a site as it was, I needed to turn the bus around before we could back in, and the campground map indicated that there was a loop at the end of the campground road we were on, so after checking out the site visually, we proceeded down the road – only to find that the loop at the end was not designed for a bus!  After some jockeying to make the first corner and lots of getting out to plan the next steps of getting past trees to continue forward we gave up, and I backed back around (again with several back and forths to make the corners and avoid other campers’ cars) and then up into the tail end of the dead-end road, and we were able to go back up the road in the direction we wanted to.  It is one of the times when I really thought I should have installed a switch to turn off the back-up beeper, and I apologized to the one camper who did stumble out to find out what we were doing …

After that, backing into the site was an easy task, and without leveling the bus, we made the bed (the boy had climbed into the bunk an hour or so before) and conked out for some much-needed sleep.

(Continued in Part 2)

Review: Trailer Travel Here and Abroad

So, a friend recommended that I might really enjoy reading Trailer Travel Here and Abroad: The New Way to Adventurous Living by Wally Byam (of Airstream fame).  While it mostly documents the beginnings and evolution of the international Airstream Caravans in the 1950’s, it also discusses some of Wally Byam’s philosophies about how travelling should be undertaken, and what the 1960’s and 1970’s future of trailer travel could look like.

While the discussions of the travails of the caravans and how they overcame (or didn’t) the problems they encountered.  While the discussions of the qualities of 1950’s American cars as hauling vehicles is cool, it isn’t as useful today as it probably was in the 1960’s, the aspects of how best to load a travel trailer for rough roads and for the management of tongue weight on the car are just as relevant now as they were then (perhaps more for skoolie travelers who have the clearance to take rough roads).

But the descriptions of the caravans are really cool.  The places that they went on the Mexican (and as far south in Latin America as they could go), Canadian, European, and African caravans, by train, oxen teams, and even the trailerites themselves hauling on ropes over dirt roads, through jungles, over rivers by fording, winching, barges and ferries, and doing field repairs along the way, set up real adventures of Oregon Trail proportions.

The African caravan that he was in the middle of while finishing the book really sounds like a pioneering wagon train sort of adventure, as they are essentially building their own roads to get the 20+ foot long travel trailers through, and having their tow vehicles limping along (or dying) through the harsh terrain.

One of the things that I can really see about this is how the shared triumphal and awe-inspiring successes and hardships that the whole groups of travelers experienced built a sense of community that could be extrapolated onto other people who had been on different caravan trips.  These people experienced different things, but felt a common bond by knowing they were amongst kindred spirits.

It must have really been awesome in the 1950’s to see the long line of Airstream trailers being pulled one after another along the roads.  There is certainly something that would be stirring in thinking about a caravan of 50 or so skoolies travelling together for a couple of months though the wilds of … well, anywhere.

But Wally Byam’s book is well worth the read.  There’s information about preparations, organization, conduct, and education in there, and not just for the caravan traveler, but for the solo traveler as well. While some of the practices are no longer valid (like using gopher holes as places to plug your waste tanks into), there are likely some that almost any reader will appreciate.