Allegheny National Forest

Tues. August 18, 2009- Here we sit, in Allegheny National Forest, PA- no Wi-Fi, no cell phone signal, no TV- Nada….it feels great! Well, it feels great now….earlier today, not so great. We left Geneva, OH, late this morning. When we had the boat, we were used to traveling first thing in the morning (6-7 am), so I am not used to getting such a late start when we head out. Maybe we don’t have the rhythm yet…I also think my mind is in vacation mode, and I really don’t feel like getting up so early. Whatever. That will probably change with time. I don’t like leaving late- you feel like you lose the whole day- can’t do anything worthwhile in the AM, and then by the time you get to your destination, the day is pretty much gone. So, we left a little before noon, drove for an hour so, with the radio on. That awful noise you hear when they do the “test of the emergency broadcast system”? Well, we heard that on the radio. As I was listening, I was thinking, “don’t they usually say they are going to do a test?” Yeah, well, it wasn’t a test, of course. The broadcast was for a severe thunderstorm warning, including one severe storm, packing 60 MPH winds, traveling from blah blah PA, to blah blah PA - couldn’t quite make out all the town names, but we knew it was near, because we were in that county and could see the nastiness up ahead. Of course, the lap top wasn’t even on, so I got it going and pulled up weather.com to check out the radar. Long story short, we avoided the real nasty stuff but had TORRENTIAL downpours on and off all afternoon. Not a pleasant afternoon. We survived, the Everest survived, no issues. Actually the best lesson we learned today was to do a better job of planning what roads to take to get to our destination. The roads we plotted brought us up the side of a Mountainous hill, on a road labeled “narrow road next 5 miles”, rather than around it. During a torrential downpour, it was stress I could have done without! During all that fun stuff, it never dawned on me that we were now in the National Forest, until we stopped and I realized I already had no phone signal, etc. That’s no big deal, except I never called Jess to tell her we wouldn’t be reachable for potentially 3 days. After setting up, we went for a walk and actually found a pay phone. I called her to tell her, so now its all good. We are sitting here listening to Judy Collins, writing and reading. Tomorrow we hope to do a 6 mile hike and then get the dinghy in the water….