We have sad news to share with you.  This was Emma’s last trip.  She was diagnosed with advanced, aggressive cancer and although she is still with us, her days are numbered.  She is not young and we were expecting this, but it’s still hard.  We are just so so sad to say goodbye to her.

Despite the sad news we wanted to share our trip with you. Please forgive us if we seem a bit distracted.

We wanted to go slow this time, so we spent almost three full days getting to Assateague, our destination of wild ponies roaming through the dunes.  We picked a few interesting sounding places that were more or less on the way to Maryland and we managed to swing by most of them.

First stop was Kinzua Bridge, AKA the bridge to nowhere.  The railway bridge was built in 1882 and was dubbed the Eight Wonder of the World.  At approximately 301 feet high and 2,053 feet long, it was the world’s longest at the time. It was rebuilt with stronger material in 1900 and closed by inspectors in 2002.  In 2003, a tornado struck the side of the Kinzua viaduct and tore the towers from their concrete bases causing the bridge to crumble down to the valley below.

The bridge was restored to an observation deck with a partial glass floor where visitors can take in the view of the Kinzua Creek Valley and the wreckage below.  The pictures don’t do this place justice.  The bottom middle picture may give you a scale of the height.  It is breathtaking.

We took so many wrong turns on this trip and night came too quickly.  We needed to find a spot for the night and Sizerville State Park, a small and well maintained state park, was around the corner.  We go there at night and were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely creek nearby for a short walk the next morning.

our next stop was another Pennsylvania disaster. Austin Dam burst less than a year after its completion in 1911. It destroyed many buildings in the town of Austin and killed 78 people.  In 1943, the dam that was built to replace the original failed as well, this time,  with no casualties. They did not build a third dam.  It was added to the National Resister of Historical Places in 1987.  You can also camp on site for $10 using the honour system as there are no hosts on site.

Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon sounded like a beautiful place to visit and it was.  However, naming the place Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon is a huge stretch as it isn’t even close to it in any way.  Still, it was a nice stop and a good place to view birds of prey soaring.

We had to stop in Cenrtalia.  Even though this ghost town has little in the form of ghost buildings, the history of the place is fascinating.  Centralia has a coal mine burning underneath it since 1962 and all attempts to distinguish it proved futile.  The town was condemned in 1992 and most of the building were grazed after the town was deserted. As you can see in the first photo, only roads and driveways leading to where once these houses stood remain.  There are graffiti on walls and trees and a lot of off-road activity in the area.

Again, it is night time and we need to find a place to rest for the night. There weren’t many campgrounds in the area we were travelling through and Christmas Pine Campground looked like a good option.  Again, we arrived at night and were pleasantly surprised to find a well maintained park nestled in the woods the next morning.  A word of warning: some parks close their gates after hours – we just made it though the last minute.

Reading was on our way, so we drove up Penn mountain to see the Reading Pagoda.  The cherry tree was in full bloom and the views from the mountain are spectacular.  The pagoda was built in 1908 to be an attraction in a tourist resort that never came to fruition and eventually sold to the city of Reading for $1.

Sometimes you take the wrong turn and it leads you somewhere unexpected.  When we missed the turn and landed in Poole Forge Park, we decided to stop there for a while.  it’s a beautiful park by the Conestoga river, originally an Iron Forge plantation, a 1770 iron master mansion, a covered bridge, a lime kiln all on the National Register of Historic Places.

The park has this contraption for bikes in need of a fix, and we were thrilled to see the Made in Canada mark on it.  Cool.

You know you are in Amish country when you see the floral dresses and black slacks on the laundry lines.  The buggies give it away too.  Lancaster is a very picturesque county and the added romantic Amish flare

We rolled into Intercourse, because we had to drive through Intercourse of course. Intercourse is visited by many immature people such as ourselves just so that they can take a picture of the town’s name.

So we did that.  We didn’t take the Amish buggy tour though (see photo above)

And just like that we hit the 20,000 km mark.

We made it to Assateague in the evening just in time to catch a few horses, walk on the beach, enjoy the sunset, and set up for the night.

We’ll have more about Assateague and an update about Emma in the next post.

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