Weekend Update

I visited Ricketts Glen State Park this weekend with Jeremy, Kev K, Steve K, and Caleb.  It was quite the awesome.  The weather forecast said 50% chance of rain all weekend, but it didn’t rain at all.

The main attraction of the park is its 33 waterfalls, some of which are 80 and 100 feet tall.  There’s a 3-mile trail that goes all the way from above the first one to below the last one, and in lots of places you can walk across the river on rocks or fallen trees.  It’s all very beautiful, but the real main attraction (for me at least) is that in a few places, you can jump off the rocks into the water, from heights of about 8 to maybe 25 feet.  The water in the two places we jumped into was 6-7 feet deep, so your feet can touch the bottom, but as long as you bend your knees while jumping, you don’t "hit" the bottom with any amount of force.  True, I only weigh about 150 pounds, but Caleb is a big strong guy who’s probably got a hundred pounds on me, and even he jumped off the high spots with no problem.

It wasn’t too hot outside though, and the water comes from a spring-fed lake, so it was pretty freezing.  Still, I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity for some cliff-jumping, and fortunately Kevin agreed.  (It’s a lot easier to jump in when someone else says "I’ll go if you go.")  As we started taking off our shirts, other hikers passing by were going, "You gonna jump?!?" so of course we no longer had any choice.

We actually had to camp at Frances Slocum State Park, because even a month in advance when I made the reservations, Ricketts Glen was booked.  But Frances Slocum is only about 20 miles away from Ricketts Glen.  And it’s really nice -- the sites are huge, with the tent-pitching areas set in the very back of the sites, almost in the woods.  There’s lots of trees/shrubbery between the sites too.

One of the highlights of the weekend was on Saturday morning when Jeremy and I went to look for firewood.  The park office lady told us to go out of the park, and right across the street, to the house of a guy who sells firewood.  It’s a normal-looking house from the front, but around back is a huge field with piles and piles of firewood.  This 73-year-old man takes us back there with a wheelbarrow, pulls a tarp off part of one pile, and starts picking nice, dry pieces of wood one at a time and placing them carefully in the wheelbarrow.  He’s talking to us the whole time -- really friendly and talkative guy, if a little grumpy and vulgar -- and climbing all over this pile of wood.  From looking at him, you might think he’s a fragile guy, but you’d be wrong.  So he’s stacking this firewood and soon there’s 15 pieces in there, and he’s talking about how he wants us to have a good fire, not a "sh---in’ little fire" like you get when you go to Those Other Places who give you 5 pieces of wood for 5 bucks.  Nay, he’s giving us an entire wheelbarrow full for 5 bucks.  After about 20 minutes, he moves over to the kindling pile.  This contains long flat pieces of wood that he picks up and lays across a tree stump and axes into long slivers.  He then breaks these across his knee into individual pieces of kindling.  Another 15 or 20 minutes here, then we move around front to load the wood into Jeremy’s Jeep.  When we’re done, he spends another 20 minutes or so telling us his life story, where he’s worked, how he was in the army, how "millions of people" died on D-Day and the officers were all evil for planning it, how us kids today don’t know what work is... not that it wasn’t all interesting, but it’s been an hour by this point.  Sure, it’s only 5 bucks, but it’s an hour of your life too.

And just when it seems that a weekend couldn’t get any better, we discover that there are Grotto Pizza locations in PA!  There were two of them, in fact, right near the park we were staying at.  So Sunday on the way home, we went to the one at the Wyoming Valley Mall in Wilkes-Barre.  I could not believe that I was eating Grotto Pizza in my home state, without being at the beach.