Monday in the mountains

At the Steamtown National Historic Site this past week (more on that later!), we learned that in 1812, a trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh took six days by stage coach. By 1901, it took just five hours by steam train. In 2021, it takes 2 trains 8.5-10 hours, 6 of those between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Hmm...

Monday morning started off great: despite traveling first thing in the morning, Dear Husband and I both managed to sleep through the night without waking up every hour, afraid of having missed the alarm. Last toiletries and food items were packed, and we walked out of the house 5 minutes early…only to discover that the bus taking us to the bus taking us to the train was running 10 minutes late—at 6:30 in the morning. So we hoofed it ~10 minutes to the busway with our luggage in the late-June, early morning heat, where we couldn’t find the express bus, which was due imminently. We weren’t even sure we were on the right side of the road (*#&% American bus stations for not listing their stops like in Europe). Luckily, the next bus that arrived would take us where we wanted to go, so we hopped on. With only two missteps, we managed to get to the Amtrak station and board the train with time to spare.  

We had 5.5 hours to read, cross-stitch, eat the breakfast and lunch we had packed, and even attend a Zoom committee meeting. The conductors were friendly, but our car was never as crowded as they warned it would be. The train stopped in various smaller cities like Greensburg (home of Seton Hill University and reportedly one of the best places in the country to retire), Johnstown (famous for its 1932 flood), Altoona, and little Lewistown. Outside Altoona we drove around the "World Famous Horseshoe Curve, "constructed in the 1850s by Irish laborers who earned $0.25 an hour and worked without power tools, according to the conductor who announced it overhead. 

Here is the view approaching the "World Famous Horseshoe Curve."
Click here to see what it has to do with Nazis during World War II.

In Harrisburg, My Awesome Parents (MAP) picked us up at the train station, and we all drove 2.5 hours to “the party house” in New Jersey to visit for a few hours with my mother’s side of the family. Then it was back in the car for another hour so we could be sure to arrive at our cabin in the Poconos Mountains along the Lehigh River with daylight to spare, since the location was so remote that GPS couldn’t find it. We almost couldn’t find it with the printed directions either, since greenery had grown over the white fence posts that supposedly marked the driveway.  

Eventually we got settled in for the night at one of a trio of cabins owned by a local entrepreneur who also runs an event center in a reconstructed barn. The original cabin was built in 1915 to be in a silent movie*, while the cast and crew stayed in the nearby inn, The Maples. You can still see the overgrown foundation of the inn after it burned down under suspicious circumstances. The cabin sleeps two, our cottage sleeps six with a couch bed, and there's a lodge with a screened-in back porch overlooking the river that sleeps four. Next to the gravel parking pad is a murky koi pond where some frogs live as well.

*The silent film, My Partner (1916), has been lost, but online synopses say it was a love quadrangle with a murder, a framing, a wrongful conviction, and--at the last minute--exoneration so the guy can live happily ever after with the girl.