Back home in upstate New York - June 17th - 26th

We left Gettysburg on Tuesday, June 17th, and drove through the mountains of central and eastern Pennsylvania heading for our destination of home in New York.  It was a beautiful ride but we found ourselves climbing to approximately 2500 ft. in some spots.

A view of the Berkshire Mountains

After an almost seven hour drive, we arrived at Woodland Hills Campground in Austerlitz, NY.  When we drove in with our rig, the workamper gulped and wondered how we were going to get it into the spot they had chosen for us.  Fortunately, with their help (we actually let them park it), we ended up in a nice spot - at least it was a nice spot until the day we wanted to leave.  Austerlitz is in the Berkshire Mountains so after spending a hot day at Mom's, when we got to the campground every night, the temperature was about 10 to 15 degrees cooler.

No sight seeing on this leg of the trip.  We spent all but one day at Mom's.  Jim and my brother, Bernie, spent lots of time cleaning the pool and getting it ready for summer while I cleaned Dad's shed, the screen house, and trimmed the bushes in front of the house.  Dad fixed everything and even though he has been gone eight years, we are constantly finding things he fixed.  This old barbecue fork was in the shed - yup, it had been fixed.

Mom was actually doing much better than when we saw her in March and even managed to walk out to the pool yard and screen house a couple of times. Penny, Stewart, Tyler and Samantha came up to visit on Saturday and had a good time in the pool.  Penny was going to bring the kids back up on Wednesday but with storms blowing in that afternoon, we decided it was safer if she didn't come up.

No trip to New York during the summer would be complete without our annual family steamed clams feast so between Bernie, his wife Nancy, Mom, Jim and myself, we managed to eat a bushel of clams (400).  We also make it a tradition to visit Jackson's Old Chatham House restaurant for dinner and this year we took Aunt Ida along.  She's "one of a kind" and managed to entertain our server who actually remembered us from our visit in March.  We walked in and she recognized Jim right away and within a couple of minutes the "jesting" began.  It was a fun night.

The night before we were leaving, Wednesday, we enjoyed a prime rib dinner at Bernie and Nancy's and just before we got ready to leave for the campground, the rain started.  Our drive back to the camper should have taken only about a half hour but instead took almost an hour.  We were in a torrential downpour and Jim had to take it very slow and easy.  Fortunately, we had everything packed up on Tuesday to make it easier for us to leave early Thursday morning for our next stop.

Crossing the Hudson River on our way to PA Dutch Country

 UNFORTUNATELY, we had over five inches of rain on Wednesday night and when we got up the next morning, the road in front of our camper had washed out.  It took the maintenance people three hours to get the road in driveable shape so we did not get on the road until 11 that morning.  We were still looking at a six hour drive to our next campground.  Not a fun day but we did arrive safely in PA Dutch Country in Manheim PA.  Now all we had to do was find a spot that would hold our rig...