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camping, Destination, Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania State Parks, school bus RV, Skoolie

A Trip to Ohiopyle and Fallingwater (Part 3)

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(Continued from Part 2)

After a quick breakfast of coffee and cereal, we packed everything up, put up the awning and headed off to Fallingwater.  While it was only about 2 miles away in a straight line, the campground was up atop a high ridge that we had to backtrack along to get down, and it ended up being an eight mile drive.

We also had to travel down PA 2010 (which was just one last long uphill drive as we were getting in so late on Friday night), which has a pretty steep grade for almost a mile of the mile and a half we were on it.  There was an option of going another route, but that would have replaced the 2010 route with a sixteen and a half mile detour.  I decided to just plan on stab braking my way down, and it all went fine.

We drove back through the town of Ohiopyle and along 381 North back up to Fallingwater.  The ‘campus’ has a couple of nice parking lots, one of which is set up for about eight RVs or buses, so parking was easy.  It was a chilly day, and the area the education people had for display space for the architectural models was in an outdoor area with a roof but no walls shielded from the parking area by some lovely evergreen trees.  That meant that while it was really comfortable out in the sun, sitting in the pavilion was kind of chilly.

Luckily, we had the bus right there and I was able to run back and get a sweatshirt for the boy, and then some coffee, and then a jacket.  The kids showed their models, and our son worked with staff to get their laptop to run Minecraft and load his world in, so he could show his. We then got to tour the Fallingwater house.

We couldn’t take an pictures inside the house during the tour, but let it be said that it certainly is a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  Low ceilings and corridors make you feel squeezed, and subconsciously make you move to more comfortable places in rooms.

After our tour, our son was able to give a tour of his house on the projector screen, but a couple other kids couldn’t get their digital data off their iphones, which was a bit disappointing.  But when it was all done, the kids were happy, the folks at Fallingwaters were impressed with what our homeschool group had done, and we went back to the campground.

Again, we took the steep shortcut and just rode it slowly.  All was fine.

Back in the campground, I turned the bus around at the intersection made by a utility (water & power) access road instead of trying the way-too-tight loop, and we slid right back into our spot. More Boss Monster ensued, and we had another chilly night.

The next morning we repeated the process of getting back to Fallingwater, but were delayed getting out of the town of Ohiopyle by a train.  While tempted to blow the train horn at them to get back at them doing so in the middle of the night near our camp, there were too many people around outside.

We arrived again at Fallingwater and over the day, the kids had some classes on architectural drawing & scaling, building paper cantilevers, and perspective drawing,  My wife found that the information area had these small little pieces of colored paper, each with directions on how to get where you were going from Fallingwater, so we grabbed one that confirmed how we would get to I-76.  Afterward, we said our goodbyes to the folks staying another night, made a quick dinner in the bus before leaving, ate, and headed back to Buffalo.

We had already decided that we would take the longer (but faster) route home, going back up 381 to 711 (and avoiding the shortcut that got us lost) to 31 and then onto The Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-76) West.  It was nice to see all the places we’d missed in the dark, and I had noticed when we’d passed over the Turnpike on our way down, so I had an idea of where we were going.

The Turnpike was it’s own adventure.  I’d never taken the bus on a toll road, and rather than having a manned toll booth, there was just a machine that spat out tickets.  As I was looking for a way to figure out what class we were, a ticket came out and, well, we were a class 3.  I guess there was a person watching somewhere. So, onto the westbound ramp we went, and I worked at getting up to traffic speed.

The speed limit was a zippy 70.

I can push the bus all the way up to 65, but that’s all the way up at 2600 RPMs, so I feel tenuous about holding it there.  So I rode us along between 63-65 while the trucks zoomed around us.  Some $17 later we got off the paid section of the Turnpike we had been on, and our exit onto I-79 North which would take us from Pittsburgh to Erie.

And again the speed limit was 70.

But we made it to near Erie and got on I-90 East, and I promptly got us off to get some fuel – just 10 gallons, as we were close enough to to the Seneca Reservation near Irving that I could fill up fully there, which we did.

Finally home!

camping, Chimney Bluffs State Park, Destination, NY State Park, school bus RV, Skoolie, trip

Destination/Trip: From Buffalo to the Almanzo Wilder Homestead

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One of the destinations we want to go to with the bus is the Almanzo Wilder Homestead,  in Malone, NY.  On first glance, you might be asking ‘who’ and ‘why’, but this is the farm that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s (of the Little House books) husband grew up on before moving west and meeting her.

Now, not only is that a neat destination, but the trip there should be lots of fun.  Starting from Buffalo, our first likely stop is up on the Tonawanda Indian Reservation to top up our fuel for the trip.  While this seems like it would take us out of our way to Malone, it puts us right by the start of the ‘Cobblestone Trail’.

Located along historic Ridge Road (NY 104), the route follows the dry areas of the geography of one of the terraces of the Niagara Escarpment, just north of the route of the Erie Canal.  Used by pioneers and homesteaders in the 18th & 19th centuries, it was the major ‘northern’ route into Western New York.

These buildings, often built using skills of masons who had been brought in to work on the building of the stone aspects of the Erie Canal, were expensive and durable, being made of cobbles left from the retreat of the most recent ice age’s glaciers.  They functioned not just as houses, churches, or workshops, but also as status symbols for the communities they were in.   Now, there’s a Museum for the Cobblestone Society comprised of three cobblestone buildings and four more 19th century wooden structures (at 14389 Ridge Road in Albion).

Farther along, north of Rochester, NY Route 104 crosses the mouth of Irondequoit Bay on a long, elevated bridge that gives a great view of both the Bay and out to Lake Ontario to the north.

Following along NY 104 to the east, just past Sodus Bay, is Chimney Bluffs State Park.  Another remnant of the glacial actions of the last ice age, the eroding glacial till is constantly changing, like the Badlands of South Dakota.   These formations continue to the east along Lake Ontario to Oswego.

Following NY 104 along that route, past Oswego, 104B heads northeast to Route 3, which heads north along the eastern shore of Lake Ontario to Henderson Bay, and just past Sacketts Bay, heading north on County Road 180 to 12E, which will take us up to Cape Vincent, where Lake Ontario flows out into the St. Lawrence River and through the Thousand Islands.  NY Route 12 ends at Morristown, but the route along the river continues as NY Route 37, and continues that way until Massena.  After Massena, the road turns south-east toward Malone.

Just ten miles short of Malone (and twelve miles from the Almanzo Wilder Homestead) is the Babbling Brook RV Park.  This looks like a great base to travel from to the Homestead.  There are only 57 sites, but a quick search for reviews comes up nicely positive, so we’re looking forward to trying them out!

Finally we can get to the Homestead itself.  The museum/home-stead consists of 84 acres of farmland, woods, restored original post and beam constructed farmhouse (1840-1843), reconstructed post and beam framed barns and outbuildings, a museum/visitor center/research library/ archives/gift shop complex, orchard, covered picnic pavilion, and nature trail to the Wilder family frontage on the Trout River.

We really think that this looks like a full day’s worth of exploration, so we’ll likely have another night at the RV Park, then head home.  While the scenic route could take us 8 or so hours (without extended stops!), the route back to Buffalo, via I-81 and I-90 could take us as little as 4 and a half.  But of course, there’s more to do on the way back if we go in a round-about fashion.  But that’s another post’s work.

And if you want to know more about Almanzo Wilder, or what the homestead was like when he was a boy, check out the book!

 

 

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Destination: The Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse Memorial

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So, another destination area for us is out to the west of the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, the Black Hills area of South Dakota and Wyoming.  The Black Hills are a small, isolated range of mountains in the midst of the Great Plains, and got their name from the way the heavily forested mountains looked from a distance across the plains.

The oldest rocks in the formation are Precambrian rocks (mostly granite in the core, dated to about 1.8 billion years ago) pushed up by volcanic uplift in the center, with more recent rings of exposed Paleozoic , Mesozoic, and Cenozoic layers going from the center out, often explained as looking at a bullseye with the oldest rock at the center and the most recent at the edges.  If you want tones of technical details, the US Geological Survey has a whole pamphlet of information on it here.

Once there, though, there are a number of localities that we would want to examine in detail:

Mount Rushmore:

Carved (and blasted) from a granite batholith formation in the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore features 60-foot (18 m) sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).   Construction on the memorial began in 1927, and the presidents’ faces were completed between 1934 and 1939 by Gutzon Borglum and then after 1941, finished by his son Lincoln Borglum.

While the Lakota Sioux called the peak the ‘Six Grandfathers’, and had been a spiritual location for the Oglala Lakota Sioux medicine man Black Elk (writer of Black Elk Speaks).   But this similarity of profiles in the view was what drove South Dakota historian Doane Robinson to suggest to Congress that historic likenesses should be carved into the mountainside to try and promote tourism into South Dakota.  This is an unfortunate byproduct of the military campaigns of 1876-78 where the United States government forcibly took the lands from the Lakota Sioux due to the controversial 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

A Native American answer to Mount Rushmore is …

Crazy Horse Memorial:

About nine miles away as the crow flies is the Crazy Horse Memorial, conceived by  Lakota leader Chief Henry Standing Bear and designed and expanded by Korczak Ziolkowski.  Intended to be a mounted likeness of the Lakota leader Crazy Horse,  this unnamed mountain peak is being systematically reduced and carved into a monument 641 feet long and 563 feet high!

Jewel Cave National Monument:

Jewel Cave National Monument contains Jewel Cave, currently the third longest cave in the world, with 179 miles of mapped passageways.  Declared a national monument by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908, it wasn’t until much later in that century that most of what we have mapped of the cave was discovered.  Named for the calcite crystals that adorned the first two miles of the original entrance, there are many other areas people can see, and an average of three additional miles are explored and mapped each year!

Wind Cave National Monument:

Another of Teddy Roosevelt’s National Monument declarations, Wind Cave was the very first cave system to get the National Monument designation in 1903.

Among its notable geological features are the calcite boxwork (caused by erosion rather than accretion), of which the Wind Caves contain almost 95% of the known boxwork formations in the world, as well as the fact that the caves form the densest three-dimensional cave maze in the world!  Definitely not a place to wander off on your own without a good bread-crumb trail.  But is also supposed to have been the site of emergence for the Lakota Sioux in their creation story, making is a sacred location.

Devils Tower National Monument:

Some 75 miles northwest of Jewel Cave is the amazing Devils Tower monolith, the remains of igneous rock that may or may not have actually erupted.  Either way, however, the sedimentary rock around it eroded away, leaving the tougher rock, with some hexagonal columns standing alone.

Again, thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, Devils Tower became the First National Monument on September 24th, 1906.  But before that, this site was sacred to several Native American tribes, with several of their legends regarding the area referring to bears, whose claws raked the sides of the monolith as they strove to get at the trapped people atop it.

This is, however, some 1470 miles from Buffalo, making it about a 25 hour trip (at bus speed) to get there.  Likely, it will be part of a bigger trip.

 

For more on Black Elk, and Lakota sacred views and practices, check out: