So, my wife wanted to go skydiving, and when she mentioned it on Facebook, she got another of our friends who wanted to go skydiving to jump with her, and two more who wanted to go watch. Our son wanted to go, and of course, I was going to be there, and as the subject of getting there & carpooling came up, I offered the bus.
All was arranged, snacks and champagne were gathered, and we set off. The location of WNYSkydiving was at the Pine Hill Airport, basically an hour away.
Unfortunately, the winds were too strong, and the jump was aborted, though our two jumpers didn’t get the notification. So we ended up having a nice picnic in the bus, and heading off to Batavia, NY in order to enjoy the offerings of Oliver’s Candies, both in their ice creams as well as in their candies. especially to pick up some of the thin, colorful ribbon candy that have just entered their seasonal production.
And the trip was nice. We skirted the edges of the Upper Stafford Marsh area along the way, making it a bit more scenic.
And after Oliver’s, we headed back home along Route 33 (which doubles up on the way as we passed Corfu). But, being a nice, sunny day it’s a nice view (even at 4x speed).
Overall, it was an uneventful trip, likely to be repeated in May when the Skydiving season restarts.
So, on the 13th of July we set out for Presque Isle State Park in/by Erie, PA. Our son had a day’s worth of homeschool classes on aquaculture, swamp & beach biomes, the geology of the park, and preservation and maintenance of the park. While it was only two and a quarter hours away from Buffalo, as the classes started at 9 am, we decided to camp overnight.
Our trip was uneventful, except for the fact that I made the mistake of topping up the coolant level in the bus before we left. Why was this a problem? Because there was a small leak at the coolant reservoir that dripped down onto the alternator, frying the voltage regulator. By the time we had hit the Angola Rest Area on the NYS Thruway/I-90, we were running on battery power. But as on our Evangola trip, I knew that the engine would keep running fine, but unlike that previous trip I had the house batteries fully charged, and chargers for both the house and bus batteries that would work when we got to shore power. But now I knew the reason WHY the alternator was failing. Unfortunately, the fluctuations in voltage damaged the board in the fridge, though I got it to work for part of the time we were plugged in.
We stayed at Sara’s Campground, whose lands abut right up to both the Presque Isle State Park and the Tom Ridge Environmental Center. Their grounds also have sites on both sides of Peninsula Drive/Route 832, the east side has sites for actual beach camping (in tents), and the west side is in the more forested area.
Sara’s Campground Site Map
So, we ended up getting Site 21 in the Forest Section. It was our first stay in a private campground, and I was frankly surprised at the density of sites! The dashcam recorded our trip into our site, including the trepidation and worries I had of getting the bus in a place I’d have to back out of.
Sara’s Campground, Site 21, with the bus all settled.
But the site was fine. The electric/water pole had a streetlight on it, so we had to put a blanket up over the windows on that side (thankfully magnets hold to bus steel wonderfully). But there were no sites to our starboard side (where the firepit was), so it was a nice open site (next to a parking lot). And the concrete pad was very nicely level, so everything was comfortable.
Saras Campground, Site 21, with the bus settled and the fire burning down for Toastites.
But right across the street (via a crosswalk with speedbumps and a pushbutton controlled set of flashing lights to cross) was the start of Presque Isle’s beaches, and we walked all the way up past the first couple of breakwaters. We did a little beachcombing, then returned and we made a fire and some lovely toastites for dinner. We had some people stop by, interested in the bus, and we gave them the tour, and some skoolie info, as they had expressed interest in working up their own.
The sunset over lake Erie, shining right through the back window of the bus.
A little while later, as the sun was setting, we found that the sun was setting directly behind the bus, through the path to the beach. It was, however, it was basically 9pm, so we were forced to get to bed before we felt we were ready.
Our next morning was fine, coffee and bowls of cereal for breakfast, and as the engine was running and I was doing our pre-trip, folks came over, interested in the bus. Alas, we didn’t have time for a tour, and weren’t returning, but they thought the concept was cool and were absolutely fine with us being there.
Unfortunately, given the short timing of us getting to the Tom Ridge Center for the aquaponics class, and then us getting from that class to our pontoon boat tour, I forgot to turn the dashcam on for those trips. But after the boat tour, I remembered to turn the cam on, so we have a video tour of Presque Isle, sped up 4x. You miss out on a whole bunch of the cottonwood tree seeds floating about at that speed, but I recorded us getting from the tour to Barracks Beach, and then down the beach road to the Tom Ridge Center again, and then around the whole park once more.
Our trip back was uneventful, except for the one tractor-trailer driver who LOVED the train horn. He paced us while we were still in PA, blew his horn and motioned for me to blow ours and gave a thumbs-up when I did, and hung out in front of us to break air for us until he got to the Angola, NY exit where he sounded his horn again and waved, and I sounded ours again.
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
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 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.
