Allegheny Kayaking Part 3

 

Day 6 - Tues 9/15

We were breaking camp and heading back to Willow Bay and had agreed to get on the water “butts in boats (BIB)” by 8:30, even though we knew that would mean an early and chilly start after a cold night. Knowing that it takes time to break camp and pack up, I woke up a little before 6 AM and well before sunrise started packing things in my tent by lantern light: sleeping bag, camping cot, etc. Once I heard Rob moving around I got out of my tent to find it was quite crisp - maybe not the mid-30’s the forecast had called for, but cold enough that I had to keep pausing to warm my hands up while I worked.

I packed and ate breakfast at the same time, taking a break from shoving stuff into dry bags every once in a while to grab handfuls of granola and dried blueberries and sip coffee. Time was growing short to hit the 8:30 deadline and so I loaded everything into the kayak in a rushed, somewhat haphazard fashion. Even though I had used up four days worth of food, hurriedly crammed in as it was my stuff took up just as much space as before - but lo and behold, I was the first one packed and ready to go which never happens! There's a pretty established packing pecking order in terms of who gets their kayaks packed first, and if I had to place a bet, if there was a Kentucky Derby of kayak packing, my trifecta bet would be Tom, Jen and Suzanne, but in this case for once I was the one able to luxuriate on the beach whilst throwing impatient shade at everyone else while they fussed their gear into their boats. We wound up launching about 30 minutes later than planned, and it was a very satisfied thirty minutes for me.

Packing boats

Jen

Rob

Suzanne

Bela

When we (finally!) launched it it was still quite cool and the combination of cool air and warm water created lovely wisps of fog all along the reservoir. The paddle back was uneventful. Suzanne, Tom and Rob crossed the reservoir to check out another campground, while Bela, Jen and I took a more direct route back. We mostly  remained in visual contact and were in touch by radio, including some gentle teasing - I would hail them as “Primary kayak group calling Backup kayak group” and so on.

Our takeout at Willow Bay was less than a mile from the NY/PA border and so just for spite (remember, the whole impetus for this destination was NY’s COVID-related travel ban, which put the kibosh on our Adirondack plans) we intentionally overshot Willow Bay paddled just across the border into New York before turning around and heading for the marina. Take that, NY swine! We entered your state anyway! 

Someone at Willow Bay had a bad night 

After unpacking the boats and loading the cars we each went our own ways with our own plans, knowing we’d meet up again later at Black Moshannon park, our next campsite. Suzanne went to check out Kinzua Bridge park. After being disappointed when it turned out the marina restaurant was closed some of the group still had unsatisfied burger cravings - Rob went back into Bradford and got a burger at Kabobs at the Option. I was more focused on cleanliness than on burgers and so had the idea of grabbing a shower at the Willow Bay campground before hitting the road. Bela liked that idea and decided to do the same and when I got to the bath house he was already there, whistling his way through a glorious hot shower. He called out to me from the shower stall that the shower ran for two minutes before shutting off - enough time to soap up on the first push of the water button, and rinse off in the second. I rolled my eyes a little at having someone mansplain to me how to take a shower - but getting clean felt so good that I couldn’t be upset about it. I showered, shaved, my gear around in my car then headed on my way.

As I already mentioned, I was not one of the ones with a burger craving and what food cravings I did have were going to be satisfied by my dinner plans (more on this in a bit) and so for lunch I was perfectly satisfied with a sandwich from Sheetz. When I pulled in I first gassed up the car, which gave me an opportunity to scope out the mask-wearing compliance of the customers (remember, we were deep in Trump country). Only once I had satisfied myself that it was safe enough did I go in and order a grilled chicken sandwich (which was surprisingly good!). Sheetz has outdoor tables but they were closed off due to COVID, so I ate in the car in the parking lot. V called while I was there, which was good timing, since it meant I could talk to her without cell phone dropouts and I could really focus on the call. So good to hear from her! How did she know the perfect time to call me?

As to food cravings, those who know me know that I am a lover of pizza above all else. While others were craving burgers, my camping fantasy was more like drone delivery to the campsite of a couple of New York style pizza slices. In fact, my pizza scheming had started at the very outset of the trip. During the drive to Bradford it had occurred to me that, as we were going to be rolling into Black Moshannon State Park in the late afternoon, it could make sense to pick up dinner in town on the way in rather than having to worry about cooking dinner dinner on top of making camp. On the way to the reservoir at the beginning of the trip I kept my eyes open as I drove through Philipsburg (the closest town to Black Moshannon) and spotted Sarina’s, an Italian restaurant/pizza place just up the road from the town’s supermarket, another resupply destination. When I passed back through the town I first made a quick stop at the supermarket (poor mask compliance! I was outta there as quickly as possible!) then ordered myself a veggie pizza at Sarina’s. I was encouraged by the counter guy’s Italian accent. Western PA has a big Italian population, and despite being in a small town I figured had a good shot at an at least passable pie.

I got to enjoy the delicious smell of my fresh pizza on the drive to the campground, but I didn’t get to taste it right away. First came setting up camp, including a Really Big Deal about who was in which campsite. We had enough campsites for everyone - in fact, we had basically reserved a whole cul-de-sac and so had almost our own little village - but when Rob arrived he pulled into a campsite without thinking about the fact that  it wasn’t the one Suzanne had assigned to him, which had a cascading effect: since Rob was in my assigned campsite, I pulled into the one across the way, which had been assigned to Tom, and so on. It really didn't matter, as all of the campsites were identical and as I said, we had privacy in our little cul-de-sac, and eventually everyone got on board with the fact that it was OK to deviate from the arbitrary site assignments Suzanne had made before the trip. 

After we all got our campsites set up we segued into happy hour. By the time I got to eating my pizza it was three hours old and no longer hot, but still, eating under cover of darkness I reveled in my sybaritic, very non-campingy indulgence while I imagined the others in the group slurping spartan camping food - gooey Mountain House meals or perhaps an assortment of jerkies. And yes, Sarina’s pizza turned out to be pretty good. I was glad I had ordered the medium rather than the personal size and I stowed the leftover slices in my cooler for the next day.

Eating pizza under cover of darkness

When I had spoken with Valerie at my Sheetz stop I had reassured her that connectivity would be much better during the car camping part of the trip and that we’d be able to talk every day. Wouldn’t you know it, though, the campground was a cellular dead zone and so after dinner (have I mentioned that it was pizza? It was pizza!) I drove out of the campground in search of phone service. I finally found signal about five miles back towards Philipsburg where I pulled off onto a side road to have a place to sit and talk. A very dark, pitch black, creepy place to talk.  But I did get through to Valerie, and no crazed axe murder materialized out of the dark, so - mission accomplished!

Day 7 - Weds, 9/16

Oh, the luxuries of car camping! For the car camping portion of our trip I slept in my nice big tent and added a mattress pad on top of my cot, which made it feel like the most comfortable bed on earth. I slept well. And we had running water, and a sink to wash dishes, and real bathrooms and showers (for those who dared to venture into them).

We started the morning slowly, but at some point decided we had lazed around enough and made a plan to hit the road and go paddling. We all decided on a time to leave, and as I was finishing getting ready - maybe two minutes before our agreed upon departure time, I looked up to see everyone else rolling out of the campground in a convoy. That left me pretty pissed off - that the group would leave without me. I briefly considered just packing up and heading home right then and there. I had been having enough trouble trying to manage the stress I was absorbing during my calls home and from the group’s Really Big Deals and the temptation was there to just bag it. But I got control over my disappointment and, noting that I was exactly on time as I pulled out of my campsite, found Suzanne stopped at the campground dumpster. Suzanne told me that Jen had waited there too but was now off somewhere trying to find me, and only Rob, Tom and Bela had bolted to the launch. Jen, Suzanne and I regrouped and headed out, Jen (whose phone battery was dead) following the two of us who had GPS.

We had expected Bald Eagle State Park to be the filler of our trip - a small and possibly very busy recreational lake that we chose just to have someplace to paddle to fill out the the week, but we were pleasantly surprised to be wrong. It turned out to be a gorgeous lake, and not very crowded at all (we suspect that it’s very different during the summer - as evidenced by the fact that the park’s web site instructs boaters to circle the lake counterclockwise. If they have to control direction like it’s an ice skating rink, then that means there are a lot of boats out there!).

By the dam at one end of the lake

Out on the lake

We had a very nice outing. It was another cool morning and so we started once again with pretty, wispy fog over the lake with the day transforming into warm and sunny weather as we got into afternoon.  We covered about nine miles and took a nice lunch break at one of the other boat launches (home to a bathroom so foul that I just peed out back rather than going inside). We had thought Bald Eagle offered only a day’s worth of kayaking, but we covered less than half of it, so we decided to return the next day, superseding our previous - and somewhat tenuous - idea of kayaking the Susquehanna River.

Special thanks to Rob for this great photo of me

I’ve mentioned that we were deep in Trump country and I stopped at an intersection on the way back to take a picture of a particularly garish pro-Trump display, involving an old pickup truck painted red, white and blue and a likeness of the man himself on the window that made it look as if he was sitting in the passenger seat. While I was there a woman pulled up at the stop sign and said out the window of her car, “I can’t believe you’re taking a picture of that monster” - a brave thing to say deep in Trump territory. She was thrilled to discover that I was taking the picture not out of admiration but to show the folks back home in my Blue bubble the level of enthusiasm there is for the man out in western PA.

MAGA Display

Back at camp I slipped my leftover pizza out of the cooler and let it warm up a little bit while we gathered for happy hour. I didn’t try to actually heat the up because that would have been tough to do over my little stove and besides, cold pizza is a perfectly fine meal - certainly better than the dehydrated science experiments I brought with me to the first part of our trip. We had a nice campfire. I had spoken with Valerie while I was driving back from Bald Eagle lake and so I, feeling a little tipsy, decided not to venture out on the dark country roads in search of cell service.

Day 8 - Thurs 9/17

Having the campground amenities of a bath house was a mixed bag. Sure, we all loved the idea of a shower and running water, but each trip into the bathroom was a roll of the dice (a “crapshoot”, if you prefer). You never knew what maskless Pennsylvania hillbilly might stroll in while you were in there and COVID up the place. Wednesday night I was heading for the bathroom to get washed up when I saw examples of said maskless hillbillies enter the bathhouse. Instead of going inside I went around the building looking for a campground map - something showing where there might be another bathhouse. Instead, I discovered something better - a single user handicapped bathroom in the back of the building. Yup, go in there, lock the door and you have your own toilet, sink and shower, and zero chance of being joined by COVID-spewing hillbillies. Having a semi-private bathroom joined pizza on my list of secret pleasures at Black Moshannon State Park.

Pennsylvania is not too strict about masks - they're "encouraged" but not required

While I am tempted to describe Thursday’s activities as “stuff I had to get over with before I could go back and take a shower in my private bathroom”, in fact they were much more. We returned to Bald Eagle State Park (about a 40 minute drive), passing along the way signs for fresh eggs and milk along with once again viewing the garish Trump pickup truck display. We launched from a different point on the lake and explored the part we had missed the previous day, including exploring up Bullitt Run, which is a (the?) source of water for the lake. The water in the run was clear cool and like many such streams, the place teemed with wildlife. Herons, eagles, mergansers, woodpeckers, and even a swimming squirrel (I hadn’t known that squirrels could swim!). Oh, and of course each day we saw at least one bald angle - I mean, the park had to live up to its name, didn’t it? Again, this was our second day of kayaking at what we thought was going to be a lackluster one day lake - and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable outings of the whole trip, offering exploration up the stream, wildlife, poking around a marina, and scenic open lake paddling. We ended on a high note, for sure.

Lunch break

The swimming squirrel

When we got back to our put-in we ran across a group we thought we had spotted the prior day - a group a grey-haired ladies who were unloading a bunch of short (rec) kayaks from a rented cargo van. At first I thought it was an outfitter dropping people off, but chatted with them (well, I didn’t, since chatting is not one of my strong suits - but others did) and it turns out they’re like us from a parallel universe. They’re a group of friends who do a trip every year the same week we do ours (this is their twelfth year). It’s fun to discover other people out there doing the same crazy stuff we do.

 Anyway, after paddling it was back to the campsite where I indulged in a secret shower. I had actually shared the existence of the bathroom with Suzanne, who like me was pretty paranoid about the bathrooms - but she wound up not using it. I could smell that someone else had been in there (perfume smell) not too long prior, but that still beat coming face to face with COVID Cletus in the main restroom.

Then it was another simple dinner. Alas, I was out of pizza so I made some nice low sodium minestrone, which I enhanced with TVP and mushrooms. I once again drove out to call Valerie and while I was out picked up some wood for a final campfire.

Final campfire

Friday we all just woke up and broke camp. I knew I wouldn’t be the first one out (that’s always Tall Tom) but I was working hard to pack quickly and so I was surprised when Rob was packed up and ready to go before I was - another trifecta bet I wouldn't have hit. As people left we all said goodbye and before I got on the road I went around and said my final goodbyes to Suzanne, Jen and Bela then headed home, stopping at the Wegman’s in Gaithersburg to pick up a challah and honey cake for Rose Hashonah, which was imminently about to begin at sundown on Friday. I got the car unpacked and myself cleaned up just in time to ... not go to religious services, since they had been cancelled because of COVID. But we did watch the online content the synagogue had put together, which was very nice. So I had a very nice end to the year 5780 rolling into a nice start for 5781.

 

Allegheny Kayaking Part 2

Day 3: Sat 9/12

Saturday was our first full day of paddling. The reservoir is long and skinny with a fork at the south end. If you're camped midway down as we were, there are basically three paddles to do: head north towards New York, head south down the fork towards the dam, or head south down the other fork. Today we decided to head for the dam, aiming to get in 15 miles, the attainment of which was a Really Big Deal. 

Getting ready to launch

We launched 9:30ish and got a good start down the reservoir. As we were passing the fork point I spotted a power boat off to our right, gradually turning left. At first I thought he was heading for the marina located just into the other fork, but he kept going slowly and turning as if he was aiming at us. Was he a threat - perhaps someone who either didn't see us or thought it would be fun to cause us a little excitement? Finally, as he got close to us I could see that he was maneuvering to come alongside us. Jen and I were the closest to him, and he called out to us, asking if anyone in our group had lost a set of car keys to a Toyota Highlander. At first I was going to say no, since no one in the group drives a Highlander but then I remembered that Rob had just replaced his trusty old Subaru with ... a Toyota Highlander. I told the boat guy that we did indeed have a Highlander driver in the group and vectored him over to Rob who (as is typical) was a little bit away from the group exploring the shore. Rob didn't have a radio on him so I radioed Suzanne, who was near him, to tell him to hold tight. The motorboat guy made his way over to Rob and sure enough, they were Rob's car keys! This left us all speechless in so many ways - that Rob's car keys had been missing for a day and he hadn't realized it, that the marina folks were good enough to track the group down (they had also left a note on his windshield, we discovered later), and perhaps craziest of all, that he found us out on the water. In a 27 mile long, 7,500 acre reservoir we were six kayak-sized needles in a haystack - but he found us! It turned out that motorboat guy (whose name, we learned, was Ed) is the husband of the woman (Barb) who sold us our parking permits when we checked in at Willow Bay and he takes care of going around and checking on the campgrounds - resupplying the pit toilets, collecting the money, and I guess delivering car keys!     

Rob gets his car keys back

Amazed at our good luck, we continued on down to the dam, where we pulled up on shore and had lunch. We spotted a cell tower on a mountaintop and sure enough, the Verizon phones had service. My ATT&T phone did not. This just proves that cell phone coverage maps are pure fiction, since the Verizon map showed no coverage in the area while the AT&T map looked much better. Suzanne tried to send a text to Valerie to let her know I was alive and well, but she attached a picture to it, which caused the transmission to fail - so Valerie didn't get it until the next time we had service, the following day.

Rob eating lunch by the dam

Those dam kayakers eating lunch and checking their phones for service

Stopping along the way to check out Pine Grove campground

On the paddle back we said we'd take a little detour and look at the marina in the other fork, joking that we'd hop out and pick up some cold beer. More seriously, we expected that the marina - or certainly any concessions - would be closed up tight after Labor Day, but the day had some more amazing good luck in store for us. Rob went up on shore and found the little restaurant attached to the marina was open - and sold beer! He returned with two six packs and enough ice to keep the beer cold during the rest of our trip back to the campsite.

The weather kicked up as we continued back - not surprising, as a front bringing overnight rain was in the forecast -  and we hit some pretty good chop as we paddled. Once back at the campsite we set to work putting up tarps to give us shelter from the rain. Rob (whose kayak is legendarily bottomless) had found room to bring along a 10 x 20 foot tarp, which he erected with a large number of guy lines and poles. Along with Suzanne's smaller tarp, it turned our campsite into a total spiderweb. I must say, I wasn't much help in putting up the tarps. I was exhausted when we got back and I had to rest for a little bit - and I timed it perfectly. I was collapsed in my tent while Rob did all the hard work, but emerged just in time to add on one or two guy lines, giving me the right to claim to have taken part in erecting the tarp (the next day I earned a little more legit cred by taking the lead in repairing the tarp's leaky spots with tape).

Campsite

Campsite from the beach

Spiderweb of tarp lines

After we were all done battening down the campsites we collected on the beach for a Cold Beer Happy Hour! We had stopped at one of the reservoir's other campsites on the way down (totally vacant, and not as nice as where we were staying) where we found and appropriated  some firewood, so after separately preparing our meals we had dinner together and made a nice bonfire on the beach.   

Cold Beer!

Happy Hour on the beach

Day 4: Sun 9/13

Sunday’s weather was true to the dismal forecast. The rain didn't arrive until early morning, but when it rolled in at around 5:30 whomever was awake - possibly all six of us - simultaneously thought, “Darn, I wish I had gotten up five minutes ago to pee!”. It was an oddly ever-changing, intermittent rain, sometimes barely misting, sometimes drenching, sometimes light, as if every five minutes the weather gods rolled the dice anew in terms of how heavy to make the weather. Fortunately, it wasn’t very cold out, for there’s little as unpleasant as being stuck out in cold rain - and there were enough periods when it let up that we could actually be out and about a little among the campsites.

Meanwhile, it being the end of the weekend and rainy, most of the other occupants of the campground packed up and left, so we expanded into a third campsite. Suzanne is a light sleeper and her sleep had been disturbed by Rob's and my nighttime noises (rolling over, getting out of our tents, and so on) and so she moved her tent from our shared campsite to what had been the kayak fishermen’s campsite so she could sleep in peace. Her tarp was so impeccably rigged where it was that she left it and her cooking gear in place rather than try to disassemble and reconstruct its complexity at her new site.

The morning was spent just relaxing, checking out each other’s camp craft, fussing with water filtering, discussing politics (something we had vowed not to do - though we knew there was no way we’d make good on that vow) and hoping for the rain to move out sooner rather than later (the forecast said clearing over the course of the afternoon).

We got a break when the rain moved out mid-day and in the afternoon we went for a hike. One of the reasons we had chosen to camp where we did was that the campgrounds connected to a hiking trail system, and we picked out a nice six mile loop hike. The rain had left behind an intense humidity, and we all sweated and went through whatever water we had brought with us as the trail climbed up to a high ridge then back down. At the highest point of our hike we all pulled out our cell phones (checking for cell service was a ritual whenever we stopped) and sure enough, all of us had service! I called home and talked to an agitated Valerie, upset because our air conditioning system had once again started leaking into the basement, which certainly threw cold water on my spirits. 

Hiking

That evening I indulged in my one packaged dinner: a pouch of Indian food (dahl curry) mixed with a pouch of mixed ancient grains. After the previous night's lackluster dinner it tasted really good, but there was a lot of it. When you're camping you sometimes engage in food safety practices a little more lax than what you would do at home. I packed up the leftovers in my Thermos to save (without refrigeration) for the next day's lunch.

Day 5: Mon 9/14

My day started with being awakened by the sound of Suzanne cooking breakfast. Apparently she had woken up at 5:30 and had made her way over to our site at about 6, at which point Rob and I were still asleep, and shortly thereafter began cooking. 

Speaking of Suzanne, before the trip she had gleaned a lot of very useful information by calling the ranger station, including learning about a campground on the other fork of the reservoir that was built on an abandoned orchard, with apples and grapes still growing wild there. Envisioning an unspoiled Eden teeming with fruit, we decided to make it our destination for the day. The trip there was about eight miles, and we were helped again by a push from the wind. There was one couple camped at the campground and they steered us to where the fruit trees were, but the fruit was a disappointment; there were few apples, and those that were there were out of reach or not ripe. Likewise, most of the grapes were small and seedy. While most of us returned from our fruit search empty-handed, Jen, using some sort of farm girl cunning, found both a nice red apple to eat and some nice grapes. I didn’t get a chance to try any grapes, since when she was offering them around I was on the phone with Valerie getting caught up on the basement flooding issue - Valerie had decided to treat the symptoms but leave finding a cure to me upon my return.

Most mornings started with a beautiful fog over the water

On the way back we decided to stop again at the marina where we had found beer, with visions in our heads of obtaining a restaurant meal - in fact, there had been a lot of fantasizing about burgers at the marina since our first visit. Well, all of us were interested in restaurant food except Tall Tom, who broke off from the group and instead went to explore a public park (which he reported was very nice). Alas, our luck had run out - the day we had bought beer turned out to have been the restaurant's last day for the season. The place was closed up tight. Instead, we sat down on the (closed for the season) boat ramp to eat the lunches we had brought along. After a bit two young guys described by the more charitable among us as being like characters out of a Steinbeck novel (the less charitable among us referenced Deliverance) ambled down the ramp, a Mutt and Jeff pair - one tall and rangy with bright red hair, the other short and obese and dressed in camo gear, with a long braided ponytail. After eyeballing us a little they sat down on the ramp and smoked cigarettes. Not long thereafter a boat came by with two fishermen - clearly people they knew - who asked if they wanted to go fish from the boat. The redheaded guy was super excited, telling us, “I’m 22 years old and I’ve never been in a boat before!” He also volunteered to us that he’s a big fan of hunting. When he shoots a noble animal, he told us, he places his hand on its heart to honor it, and he doesn’t waste anything - he even uses the animal's bones to make things. I am not a hunter but pulled out what little I knew to manage a conversation, asking him if he ever bow-hunted. Drawing upon a well of deep belief that I made up on the spot, I opined that it was the purest form of hunting since it was more of an even match between hunter and prey. He wholeheartedly agreed and added that's why he likes hunting with muzzle loaders as well. I thought to myself, "Faking being a redneck test passed!" Camo guy was less talkative, but they both turned out to be quite friendly.

The guys on the boat were very friendly too. We chatted about what they were catching (walleye, bass, pike, but never carp - for some reason they disdain carp). They asked if we were out hunting, since several of us were in high visibility orange. We said no, just paddling and camping. Once again drawing on my deep well of hunting knowledge (I had looked this up before we left for the trip) I noted that it was squirrel season, and I wasn't into hunting critters. Boat guy nodded. I thought to myself, "Faking being a redneck test part 2 passed!" 

The paddle back turned into a slog as the wind picked up (why is it that every trip report seems to contain this sentence?) - 20 MPH gusting to 30, we estimated, with waves building to about 1.5 ft. Paddling into the wind in these conditions wasn't dangerous, but the push backwards from the wind and waves makes you feel like you're paddling on a treadmill. I was glad I had decided to don my elbow braces - after long periods of clenching the paddle and paddling hard I start to get pain in my elbows. Tom radioed when he got back to camp and that he was monitoring the VHF in case we needed anything. He's got a strong safety focus even when he's in the mood for solitude.

The nicest sunset of the trip

We were fixin' to break camp early the next morning and head back to the cars and so in the evening  we partially disassembling camp - we took down tarps and packed a few things. For dinner I just scrounged from among my leftover food rather than cooking, resulting in a delicious dinner of cheese, vegan jerky and crackers, carrots, granola, and for dessert, coffee and Fig Newtons.

At bedtime we prepped for what was going to be the coldest night of the trip, colder than we had expected from the advance forecast, with temps down into the 30's and a frost warning in effect.

Campfire photos

 

 

Allegheny Kayaking Part 1

Thurs 9/10: Meeting up in Bradford

This is the trip that was almost stolen from us by COVID. For months, as the pandemic raged on, we wondered whether we would be able to pull off a trip at all and whether it would be advisable even to try. But we persevered - over the course of several months we talked out ways to socially distance from each other while camping (in case one of us unknowingly showed up infected) and researched other details (there's a surprising body of knowledge - mostly in the form of Youtube videos - out there about how to do COVID-safe kayak rescues). All along we kept planning, with the Adirondacks as our destination.

Shortly before our trip a monkey wrench got jammed into the works when New York placed into effect a travel ban on residents from 35 states, including Maryland and Virginia. We hurriedly began scouting for alternatives in states without such restrictions and settled on Pennsylvania. For a while we kept planning the Adirondacks and the Alleghenies in parallel, but eventually we gave up on the ADK's and went all in on the Alleghenies, which turned out to be just fine.

Pennsylvania, for all its merits, is not a state with a lot of kayakable wilderness waterways. The plan we came up with was four nights back-country kayak camping on the Allegheny Reservoir, which straddles the NY/PA border in the western part of the states, followed by three nights of camping at Black Moshannon State Park which would include day trips to go paddling.

The drive to our meeting point, Bradford, PA, was a mere five and a half hours, which is short for one of our trips. In COVID times it was a bonus to have a relatively short drive, as it reduced the need to enter suspect rest stops, find meals, and so on. I made the drive easily, with a stop  in the parking lot of People's Natural Gas Stadium, home of the Altoona Curve Minor League Baseball team, to eat the lunch I had packed. I had hoped to find picnic tables there, but alas, there wasn't anything available outside the stadium. 

Prior to making plans for this trip I had never heard of Bradford, PA, but in a bizarre coincidence, just days after we decided on Bradford as our meeting place the drummer of a band I've just joined posted a whole bunch of pictures from Bradford on Facebook. It turns out his wife is from the area, and thanks to him we arrived with insider knowledge of where to eat and what to do.  

Sanitizing my hotel room upon arrival

We got takeout dinner from "Kabob's (sic) at the Option", recommended by my drummer friend. Bradford, it seems, was a wealthy boom town in the original 19th century oil boom (Pennsylvania was an oil producing state long before anyone thought of Texas as a place to look for oil) and signs still exist of its past prosperity. The "at the Option" part of the restaurant name comes from the fact that the restaurant is housed in the ornate old oil option exchange building. As the oil industry faded, the option house became a restaurant and to this day contains an opulent bar installed in the 1930's. Sadly, due to COVID concerns we didn't eat inside in the restaurant; we took our food to-go in plastic containers and ate on the pool deck at our hotel. After dinner all of us except Tom went to the (also recommended) Bradford Brewery - nice environment (outdoor seating), OK beer, terrible service.

The Option House

Inside Kabob's at the Option

Bradford Brewery

Friday 9/11: Launching from Willow Bay

Friday morning I awoke early. After eating my "grab and go" breakfast from the hotel (COVID era replacement for the breakfast buffet) I headed out to find a nearby geocache, then tried to go with Rob for a more substantial breakfast at a diner in town, only to find it closed due to COVID. We all formed up and drove the 20 minutes or so to our launch point, Willow Bay Recreation Area. While we seemed to take plenty of time getting ready, apparently we were rushing a little bit in that I somehow managed to lose the pair of earbuds I had brought along (nice ones I had just bought!) and Rob ... well, I'll get to that later. while we were packing our kayaks a fisherman coming in warned us to be careful - he does search and rescue on the lake and has plucked out many kayakers in distress. We thanked him and reassured him that we're all pretty experienced. He also welcomed us to the "prettiest place on earth". He clearly hasn't traveled much. Don't get me wrong, the Allegheny Reservoir is a pretty place, but I would say it falls a little short of his billing.

Whenever I launch on a kayak camping trip my first thought when I try to get the fully load boat moving is, "oh boy, this is going to be a haul." It takes a lot of effort to overcome the heavy boat's inertia and get it it up to speed, but in fact, once it's moving it doesn't feel too bad to paddle. We were soon cruising along with a slight wind at our backs helping us along. The reservoir is long, straight and skinny so no sophisticated navigation skills were required and after about six miles we came upon Handsome Lake campground. We had been advised that this campground was often crowded with hikers and was a little bit ugly due to downed trees, but in fact from the water it looked decent and nearly deserted - we spotted one couple there. Despite the attractiveness of the site we decided to continue on to our planned campsite, Hopewell campground, which is less than a mile farther down the reservoir. As we approached Hopewell we could see it was far busier - from a distance we could see a powerboat, a pontoon boat, and a cluster of kayaks on the beach. Some of us thought we should just turn around and go back to the seemingly quieter Handsome Lake, but checking out Hopewell become the trip's first Really Big Deal and so we wound up going there and making the decision to squeeze the six of us into the two available waterfront campsites, which put us in between a group of kayak fishermen and the family with the pontoon boat. This is a little less solitude than we usually aim for, but when you're trying to make a decision among six people, sometimes it's easier to just choose the acceptable place you're already at rather than muster everyone to go to the unknown place you haven't been. Anyway, the campsites weren't bad at all - level, wooded, nice view of the water, and with a picnic table apiece.

The reservoir was quite low so when we landed we had a big rock beach and a liuttle bit of a climb between us and the campsites. The beach turned out to be a nice place to hang out, but it did mean a little bit of a schlep for the gear. We benefited from the presence of old people to get the senior discount (50% off!) on campsites, and after a minor Really Big Deal about how we were splitting up and how many sites we needed, we settled in with Rob, Suzanne and me on one site and Tom, Bela and Jen on the other.

Hanging out on the deep beach exposed by the low water levels

Fitting the six of us into two campsites still gave us room to socially distance from each other, but it did put us in closer proximity to each other than we had expected and I think some of us were a little jittery about the somewhat close quarters. Suzanne ceded the picnic table to Rob and me and staked out her own little sub-section of the site, I think in part (perhaps not even consciously) to maintain her own COVID bubble.

One of our social distancing moves for the trip was to eschew our usual practice of having group dinners and go totally on our own for food. For whatever reason, I decided to go full-on backpacker and prepare compact dehydrated meals. I also had the goal of doing as little dishwashing as possible, so I tried to make most meals in boil-in bags or the like. I can't use the commercial Mountain House style backpacker foods since they're all insanely high in salt, so I decided to roll my own, with decidedly mediocre results - primarily because I threw too much stuff into each meal. Teddy had abandoned various dehydrated foods left over from his distance hiking at our house when he moved, so I was like, "well, if dehydrated chili is good, then dehydrated chili with some added broccoli, mushrooms and kale must be better!" Not necessarily. My first meal was in fact, a black bean chili-ish meal, with fresh cheese and tortillas. Edible, but probably would have been better using just beans and TVP to make a vegetarian chili without the vegetable "mix-ins".

Boiling my dinner

The chef at work

Dinner 1: Something vaguely resembling chili

Dinner 1 in its dehydrated state

Another social distancing adaptation: we each had our own connectors to fill water from the filter - no handling of common water receptacles

Paddle Like It's 1999

This past Sunday I headed out for a quiet Sunday coffee paddle and look who I ran into at the marina! This was a nice blast from the past - Dave and Cyndi were my paddling companions throughout many years of kayaking. Cyndi largely moved on to cycling, and so it was good to see that they still get out on the water from time to time. We paddled together to Hains Point and back. It turns out we had all brought coffee and snacks, so we had coffee together back at the marina.

Combo Weekend: Tuckahoe and Rehoboth

In the era of COVID, we're not getting away from home much (no one is) and so it felt pretty amazing to take a trip that lasted FOUR whole nights and took us two states away from Virginia (three, if you count DC).

Valerie and I had a goal of visiting our friends Gail and Chris, who moved a few years ago to their dream retirement home in Rehoboth Beach. We figured that as long as we stayed away from the busy parts of the beachfront, the COVID risk was OK. Meanwhile, some of my kayak friends were planning a socially distant camping trip to Tuckahoe State Park on the Eastern Shore - a location which is pretty much right along the route to Rehoboth. Through some miracle we were able to influence these two trips to align in a way that allowed us to make one big combined trip out of it.

After I spent some significant time Friday morning cramming two bicycles, a kayak, cycling gear, camping gear, kayaking gear, and vacation gear into my car, we set off and made it to Rehoboth (really Lewes, but who's counting?) in record time. Let me tell you, light traffic is the silver lining in this whole coronavirus thing. I unloaded the bikes and Valerie's things, hung out for lunch, then headed an hour back west to Tuckahoe. The state park is quite lovely. The campsites are quite big, so it was easy to feel safe in terms of social distancing. Rob arrived just as I did, followed not long after by Tom and Suzanne. We all had adjacent sites; Bela and Leigh brought their camper and so stayed in a different part of the park (we were in the tent loop).

As always, it's interesting to see what every brings to set up their camp. I went on the minimal end, since I had to be conservative with space in the car. Small tent (the one I take kayak camping), and minimalist kitchen gear (I had planned meals that didn't require much cooking). I did bring my folding table, a full size chair and my 9 ft Kelty tarp. These came in handy when it sprinkled during dinner one night. Rob had a slightly more sophisticated setup with a full pop-up shelter. Suzanne managed rain protection with some impressive campcraft origami, erecting a tarp over the picnic table at the campsite. This gave her shelter for cooking and eating. I wish I had taken a picture of what she set up - it was a masterpiece of tent poles and guy lines. She also went with a more complete kitchen than I did. I didn't see much of Tom's campsite - he was at the far end and I never made it over there, and I never made it over to Bela's. 

My campsite

One new-to-coronavirus-times thing most of us brought was our own alternative bathroom facilities so that we didn't have to enter the campground restrooms if we didn't want to. These included variants on the old "groover" concept. For my part, I bought a toilet seat that snaps onto a five gallon bucket, which I paired with a Home Depot bucket that had a big "Let's Do This!" slogan on the side - an amusing combo. My toilet seat came as a cheapo combo with a really minimal privacy tent - but it did the trick. Or I imagine it would have - due to the vagaries of my digestive system (sorry, TMI) I never wound up testing it.

Let's do this! 

Unfortunately, we couldn't share meals but we did do socially distant hanging out after dinner then turned in early. The weather had been hot and sticky, so the cool temperatures overnight on Friday a were a very pleasant surprise. 

Saturday morning we rolled early to get on the water ahead of the heat. We launched onto Tuckahoe Creek from Covey's Landing (not COVID's Landing) and headed upriver through water lined with spatterdock and wild rice. Our original goal was to paddle to the town of Hillsborough and back, but when we got there we all felt we had some energy left in us and so we decided to continue on to see a cool old railroad bridge a bit further upriver. I expected that we would turn around at that point, but Tom and Suzanne took off continuing upriver. I got hung up on some submerged trees and had to back out and go through a different span of the bridge. Rob was hanging back to get some pictures, and Bela was near the back too. 

Approaching the 19th century railroad bridge

The Paddler from the Black Lagoon

At this point, the whole nature of the trip changed for me. What had been a group traveling and making decisions together now split, with Tom and Suzanne pushing ahead up front - how far, no one knew - while the rest of us, with no control over the matter, were reduced to chasing after them for as long as they continued to paddle upriver. Those who know me know I like to have a plan and stick with it, so this unexpected open-ended leg of the trip put me into a bad frame of mind for a little while. Fortunately, after not too long the river became too narrow and full of deadfalls to navigate and we all turned around and headed back together - once more as a unified group. I felt better again. We made a lunch stop at a nice quiet landing, which included taking a dip in the river to cool off, as it had gotten quite hot.

By the time we got back to camp we were all a little worn out from 15 miles / five hours of paddling in the hot sun. Rob, a little dazed, I guess, backed his car into a tree - twice! - while trying to back into his campsite. I joined in the post-paddling hanging out but after a little while was abruptly overwhelmed with tiredness and slinked off to my tent for a nap. Only Suzanne came back full of energy - while the rest of us collapsed in one way or another she went on a hike.

It could have been worse - he could have dented his kayak

We each prepared and ate our separate dinners then met up at Rob's site to chat. We had the idea of making a fire (Bela even brought wood) but it was too darn hot to do so.

Sunday we rose early again after a hotter, stickier overnight. We wanted to beat the heat again and also wanted to be back in time to break camp before "checkout time" of 1 PM. Tom managed to get up, break camp and pack all his gear before we rolled to go kayaking; the rest of us packed some things but left others for afterwards. We went to the same launch and did a six mile, 2 1/2 hour paddle in the opposite direction from the day before. It was once again quite hot, so we took a nice break for splashing and rolling practice. When we got back Tom headed straight home, while the rest of us headed back to the campground to clean up and take down the rest of our stuff. I took the time to repack some things to be ready for the next phase of my trip. Rob, Suzanne and Bela headed for home, and I headed back east to Rehoboth.

Splash break

Suzanne and Bela

Gail and Chris were, as always, the perfect hosts. They always seem really happy to host guests and to prepare little niceties (like home-baked scones) and I feel totally at home in their house. We didn't really go out Sunday afternoon. For dinner we grilled salmon and corn and then went over to the Hopkins Farm Creamery for dessert. The Creamery is within walking distance of the house, but again, in the COVID era they've done away with ordering at the window and milling about waiting for your order. Instead, everything is done via drive-through. You drive over and join a long line of cars. As you get towards the front someone comes over and takes your order, and by the time you reach the front your order is ready. Not as much fun (and you can't go look at the cows - though you can still smell them), but it is what it is.

While I was off camping, Valerie and Gail watched the sun rise at the beach

Monday Gail, Chris and I went for a 28 mile bike ride through pretty and surprisingly varied terrain - paved bike trails, sandy beach trails at Cape Henlopen, down into Rehoboth beach, and through some stunning neighborhoods (Henlopen Acres) back to the house. Chris and I had been talking Friday night about the latest cycling buzz about how we've all been running our tires at too high a pressure and that the new orthodoxy was becoming to ride at lower pressure. When we got back from our ride Chris told me that before our ride, while I was inside getting ready, as an experiment he had let some air out of my tires, reducing the pressure by about 10 psi. Not his tires, my tires. To tell you the truth I didn't notice and so no harm done, and Chris is an adorable puppy-dog of a person so it's hard to be mad at him, but part of me was angry - it really wasn't his place to mess with my bike without asking me. Perhaps on our next ride I should loosen the cables on his brakes - y'know, just as an experiment. Grrr. I felt violated.

Biking through Cape Henlopen

Monday afternoon we all went over to a quiet, bay side beach. It's hard to believe this place exists - no crowds, easy on street parking. It's just a little neighborhood beach that's apparently not popular with the tourists because it has no waves and no honkytonk boardwalk. Well, let me tell you, going in the water was wonderful! And then, as if we hadn't done enough activities, Valerie and Gail did a short bike ride while Chris and I hung out back at the house.

Monday evening was an exercise in flightiness. We were going to order dinner in; however, despite deciding the previous day that we would have to order food early because of the crowds we did no such thing and sure enough, the restaurant we had targeted had a super-long wait for orders. We would up having to call around to find a place we could get food without a crazy wait - but we did, and all was well.

Tuesday morning I once again played the game of loading the car with all our stuff, and Valerie and I headed home, happy to have had a great trip and sad to see it come to an end.