Category Archives: camping

Allegany State Park, camera, camping, Dash Cam, Destination, driving, horns, school bus RV, Skoolie

A Week in the Bus (Allegany State Park trip – Part I)

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So, after a hectic summer hiatus of making updates, I’m back.

Not much has happened on working on the bus, but we DID get to make a trip, and I got some night footage on the dash-cam.  During the last week of August, we spent a whole week in the Red House area of Allegany State Park.  Due to some other scheduling, our Saturday departure (and the less than 24-hour prep time) wasn’t during the afternoon, like I’d hoped, but well after dark.

But with the bus relatively packed and the canoe on the car (with my wife following behind) we started off on the ~80 mile trip.  The trip encompassed well-lit streets, in Buffalo, and smaller villages like Ellicotville and Salamanca, as well as expressways that ranged from well- and sparsely-trafficed, and from well- to poorly-lit, and then there were the more rural two-lane roads as well.  And then there was some rain – an interesting test, as there’s no wipers up on the eyebrow window.

I thought that in the well-lit (lots of streetlights) or well-trafficed (lots of headlights), the camera did well.  After I had the alternator rebuilt, the headlights are MUCH brighter, but in some places in the recording you’d never know they were on.  And the footage of the reflective signs on the 219 where there was hardly any late-night traffic reminded me of an early 80’s driving game I had for our family’s Apple IIe.

But once we were there, we did plenty of troubleshooting (another upcoming post), socializing, and I got requests to sound the horns!  But perhaps the coolest thing was when we were driving the canoe to the launch and saw a warship out on the lake.  We ran into Gerald and Esther Kirk who were our running their nearly 11 foot long working model of the U.S.S. Boston (CAG-I) (A heavy cruiser converted to a Terrier missile cruiser, much like Buffalo’s USS Little Rock (CLG – 4) which is a light cruiser with a Talos missile system.)

When we get our pictures downloaded, I’ll add a couple, but I did find this bit of video  which doesn’t do the model justice, and Gerald HAS the Terrier launchers in place, and they not only rotate, but can elevate the missiles as well.  The thing is a work of art and hard work, and Gerald spent the better part of 40 minutes giving us a ‘tour’, explaining life on the ship, and answering kid’s (and our) questions on both the real ship and the model.

 

More on the trip in Part II.

camping, Destination, driving, school bus RV, Skoolie, trip, Uncategorized

Bonus Destination: The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota (Rolled by One Man)

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Yet another of the destinations we want the bus to take us to is Darwin, Minnesota.  ‘But why?’ you might ask, never having heard of this significant location.  The answer, my friends, is that Darwin is the home of the Biggest Ball of Twine (Rolled by One Man).  Other places may vie for the ‘Biggest Ball’ title, but so far, Darwin’s holds the moral high ground by making it a single individual’s work (read more on the others here).

The enclosure that houses the ball.

The ball is 12 feet in diameter and weighs 17,400 pounds.  It took  Francis A. Johnson 29 years to complete, and he was apparently a stickler for turning the ball so that the windings would keep it circular (though it is reportedly sagging a bit since becoming a permanent exhibit).  The production of the ball was also apparently responsible for his death from accumulated twine dust.

Francis A. Johnson and his Twine Ball
Francis A. Johnson and his Twine Ball

And the Twine Ball Museum is open during the Twine Ball Day celebration, and by appointment (it also houses some baseball memorabilia).  That’s right, on the 2nd Saturday in August there’s a festival around the celebrated ball, which includes a Twine-K runn and the Minnesota Minn-e-Rods tractor pull, which takes place on Main Street where competitors find out who has the strongest lawn tractor (and you can check out their Facebook page – it doesn’t seem to get much traffic) .

All that said, Darwin (located about 60 miles almost due west of Minneapolis) isn’t too close to any of our other current destinations, though it could be a nice stop on our way out to the Badlands area and the Black Hills of South Dakota.  Luckily, there are a few places that look like viable overnight spots for the bus, like the Lakedale Campground, about five miles away, the Lake Ripley Campground about 10 miles away (though it’s a first-come place – they don’t take reservations), or the Cokato Lake RV Resort, about fourteen miles away.

And yes, the inspiration for this travel destination was Weird Al Yankovic’s 1989 song “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” which if you haven’t seen it, is here for your listening enjoyment:

camping, Destination, driving, school bus RV, Skoolie, trip, Uncategorized

Destination: The Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick and Halifax, Nova Scotia

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Another of the locations that we want to take the bus to is in New Brunswick, namely, the Bay of Fundy (around Irving Nature Park, near St. John).  And if we’re going that far, Halifax, Nova Scotia isn’t far away.

The Bay of Fundy has some of the greatest tidal change in the world!
The Bay of Fundy has some of the greatest tidal change in the world!

The Bay of Fundy is a cool place for people who can appreciate geology.  One of the awesome things about it is that it has some of the greatest tidal range in the world, spanning about 56 feet of change between high and low tides, which happen twice each every day.   (Which hit a difference of 71 feet in 1869 in a perfect storm of a tropical cyclone, low barometric pressure, and a spring tide.)  In addition to this, the bay area is also seated in a rift valley where most of Nova Scotia could have peeled away from North America if that pesky mid-Atlantic Ridge hadn’t meddled in the tectonic action.

Just like in school. I'm talking about the Cobequid-Chedabucto fault at the top of the illustration (from http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~polsen/nbcp/basinevolution.html)
Just like in school. I’m talking about the Cobequid-Chedabucto fault at the top of the illustration (from http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~polsen/nbcp/basinevolution.html)

If you’re not big into geology, what you could take away from this is that a bunch of the rock layers in this area are igneous (volcanic), so they’re different from other areas of nearby Canada.  These rocks (and their differential rates of erosion) are one of the things that create the ‘flower pot’ rock formations people are walking and kayaking around in my first picture of the post.

Some of the cliffs around the Bay of Fundy.
Some of the cliffs around the Bay of Fundy.

It also created some really cool cliffs in the area.  The formation of the Bay and it’s high tides also creates ‘bores’ in some of the rivers that can actually reverse the direction of their flows as the tide comes in.  These ‘bores’ are places where a wave front makes it’s way up the river against the flow as the tide comes in.

The area just seems to beg for a canoe and some strong paddling arms.

But beyond (farther east) is Halifax, Nova Scotia.  It’s not quite as far east as we could reasonably take the bus on the continent (out near Sydney would be about it, unless we wanted to take the ferry out to Newfoundland and drive about there!).   But Halifax has some neat stuff, like the Alexander Keith’s brewery, which is one of the oldest breweries in Canada,

Citidel Hill (Fort George) in Halifax
Citidel Hill (Fort George) in Halifax

the Halifax Citadel (Fort George), a seven-pointed earthworked fort atop the hill that overlooks Halifax, and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which seems to have a wealth of  information on Halifax and Nova Scotia’s nautical contributions and history and is also the oldest and largest Maritime Museum in Canada.

There’s a nice-looking campsite about 20 km away, the Woodhaven RV Park.  It looks to be about a 90 minute bike ride to the southern area of Halifax, but the Citadel has parking for buses and RVs, so it might be a reasonable thing to just park the bus there and sight-see.

Part of the other fun of this trip is the driving! The trip to St. John should take us about 13 hours (847 mi) at Google speeds, and probably about 14.25 or so bus speeds – if we go via the Thruway and other highways.  According to Google, if we skirted just south of the Adirondacks through Ticonderoga, NY and up to Burlington, VT and through Lancaster, NH and Augusta and Bangor, ME, it would only take us 15 hours (827 mi), and probably 16-17 hours at bus speed.

From St. John to Halifax is only about 4.5 hours, though it seems a circuitous and scenic route as it curves around the Bay of Fundy, the Minas Bay, and Cobequid Bay.  And just off the path, of course, is Prince Edward Island for just that many more tempting sights.

As you can see, this trip could turn into something long, and would need some careful planning for overnights of travel, parking, and fuel stops.  But this gives some nice bones to flesh out!