The National Pike was our destination for today. The section we covered was only about 30 miles long in western Maryland but the original road started over by D.C. and ran to nearly St. Louis. It was built as a toll road intended to make it easier for mid-18th century travelers to get from the east coast to the American frontier. In current times, it is shown as US-40 and it is a skinny, two-lane blacktop road running through spectacular scenery and historic towns.
Going east from Grantsville, the first town we encountered was Frostburg, a particularly scenic little town with beautiful old houses and a National Pike toll house that remains from the old days. There is a schedule of tolls listed on the outside of the toll house indicating how many pennies it would cost to go a certain number of miles based on the type of livestock, wagons, oxen, or carriages using the road. A rich person’s carriage with four horses cost more than a peon leading a horse, for instance.
US-40, at least around here, is a very curvaceous road with considerable climbing and descending between small towns. Sometimes the road is atop ridges with fine views and sometimes the road runs alongside creeks or rivers through canyons with steep rock cliffs on each side. It is quite pretty. On our way back east from Frostburg and Cumberland, we took some side roads and found ourselves going to places unintended. We did find a working strip mine and it is pretty plain why folks do not want to live near them. It was a tremendous gouge into the earth and there were massive spoils piles of different colors and materials spread over maybe 1000 acres. The water at the bottom of the excavation looked funny. There were gigantic mining machines belching exhaust and making a tremendous racket as they bustled about getting to the coal.
We left the strip mine and headed back home but we made a side trip to downtown Grantsville which is a tiny burg with a old National Pike masonry bridge that was built by a distant ancestor of the Schriver family. It is a beautiful structure and it was the longest span bridge (80 feet) in the country at the time it was built.
We cut our tour off early today so we could do a little prep for departure tomorrow from this part of the world. We will continue mostly west in the morning.
To see today’s pictures, click the asterisk *

We awoke in our strange RV park in Grantsville, MD, this morning without any really weird stuff happening last night. There is a goon right up our gravel road proudly flying his Confederate flags and there were many denizens skulking about the park in gas-powered golf carts and Rhinos but no harm came to us.
We headed back west on I-64 to Cumberland, a gorgeous city with screwy streets, many old historic buildings and a whole fleet of churches, all built on the steep gorge walls of the Potomac River. Cumberland was the westernmost point of the old C&O Canal, a water-filled ditch capable of carrying canal boats from the Delaware River to here. For some reason, C&O, which stands for Chesapeake and Ohio, does not originate at the Chesapeake anything and it never goes to Ohio. It should probably be called the D&M but who am I to suggest the name should describe the object. The canal was built by unskilled labor with picks and shovels and, after passing 72 locks, it rises to a top elevation of 605 feet from sea level at the Delaware River.
After stopping at a place called the Crabby Pig (good food, good prices) this morning in Cumberland, we walked a short distance to the Visitor Information Office and found lots of maps, displays and a volunteer that whose gender was unidentifiable but who was very informative. The weather has returned to miserable temperatures and soul-sucking humidity so we shot through unshaded areas pretty quickly.
We went exploring on the sidehills of Cumberland and found an amazing variety of really gorgeous old buildings. Americans have been living here in substantial numbers since the early 1700s and many of the original buildings remain, including George Washington’s headquarters used during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Cumberland has been a transportation hub for 300 years where roads, the C&O Canal, railroads and the Potomac River all come together in one community.
After considerable architecture ogling, we drove down MD-51 which runs parallel to the C&O Canal for about 30 miles to the Paw Paw Tunnel where picks and shovels and some black powder blasted a tunnel 3000 feet through a mountain to save building about 7 miles of canal and locks. When we tried to close the loop and return to Cumberland, however, we found many roads clearly shown on the maps we got at the Cumberland visitor center that did not really exist or, if they existed, were little gravel tracks where we could almost hear Dueling Banjos and folks asking us to squeal like a pig. We begged off on the shaky roads and drove almost to Virginia to get out of there. On the way home, we ran into a thunderstorm that started with a little lightning but soon blossomed into a torrential downpour that, fortunately, ended not too long after flooding the road surface and then disappearing.
To see the pix, click the asterisk *

Today was a travel day. We left Gettysburg Farm TT near East Berlin, PA, and headed west on skinny rural highways for about an hour before running into I-81 where we turned south for a bit. After a short drive on I-81 we turned west and followed the Mason – Dixon line on I-64, an ancient freeway with world-class paving defects sufficient to cause inadvertent lane changes. We wandered into Maryland as we continued our westward trek and soon ran into some mountainous terrain such that it seemed we were almost always turning, ascending and descending. There were few straight, level sections.
As we have traveled this year, we have run into many things on the east side of the Mississippi River with the named of Cumberland. Where Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky come together we visited the Cumberland Gap NHP. In eastern Tennessee we crossed the Cumberland Plateau. Today we drove through a city in far western Maryland called Cumberland. They do not seem to have any relation but they are all scenic. Cumberland, MD, is a gorgeous community built in some terribly steep valleys with an abundance of historical and highly snazzy buildings. We will go back and visit but today we continued on to Grantsville, about 20 miles short of West Virginia.
We pulled off I-64 and headed to a place called Little Meadows RV Park. It is a strange park. First, they only take cash. There is absolutely no wifi or sewer hookups. Even electrical and water hookup was challenging because the place is not so much an RV park but actually a place where many folks have pulled in their trailers and built yards and sheds around them. The folks across the street from us could not pull their trailer out of the park without substantial demolition of the shed their trailer is parked under, their gardens, their lighting arrays, retaining walls of rubble and myriad other alleged improvements. The RV campground is on the opposite side of a 100 acre pond from the office and concealed in a thick grove of hardwood trees. We initially thought it was too dirtbag to stay but we found a smidgen of adventurousness and pulled into a campsite after slithering down the squirrelly gravel roads lined with trees. There is no satellite reception because, due to the trees, we cannot really see the sky.
We’ll give it a try because there is absolutely no other place to go in this part of the world, barring a WalMart parking lot about 50 miles away.
We took a few pictures on the road. See them by clicking the asterisk *

We stayed busy today but didn’t see much. We made reservations in West Virginia for our upcoming travels and that turned out to be more difficult than we expected. In most states, there are few problems finding an RV park near where we want to go. However, in West Virginia, there are few parks and even fewer in locales we wish to visit. Even in the state capital, Charleston, there is only one park and it is a state park with no sites that will accommodate our fifth wheel. We spent a good deal of time yesterday and the entire morning today getting three reservations. We will be moving through WV at considerable speed because we just could not find enough places to stay.
We bought liquor in York. We fueled the truck. We stopped at a vegetable stand and Peggy was all grins. I dumped the tanks. We will leave Pennsylvania tomorrow and continue our trek toward the west coast.

A little historical journey was our task for today. We left our camping spot at Gettysburg Farm Thousand Trails, which is actually in East Berlin that is nowhere near the town of Gettysburg, and headed southwest to the real Gettysburg. Gettysburg is a gorgeous community with loads of old historical buildings. New buildings around here would be those built after 1900.
But back in July, 1863, a month after Robert E. Lee had a dramatic victory at Chancellorsville, he had marched his Army of Northern Virginia through the Blue Ridge and then northward across Maryland and Pennsylvania, coming to rest near Gettysburg. The Union Army was in hot pursuit and on July 2, the two massive armies engaged at Gettysburg. The battlefield was massive – part of the town of Gettysburg was within the Confederate stronghold. More troops from both sides poured into the area while the fighting was going on. The Confederate Army took up positions on Seminary Ridge and the Union Army on Cemetery Ridge, about a mile away.
On July 3, the day started with both sides opening up with a two-hour bombardment of the other’s positions but nobody yielded. Then 12,000 Confederate soldiers advanced across flat, open ground in the attack known as “Pickett’s Charge” and Lee’s army lost 5,000 men in one hour. There were other skirmishes at Little Round Top, The Angle, The Peach Orchard, Warfield Ridge, The Wheatfield and Plum Run that resulted in a total of 55,000 casualties. More men fell at Gettysburg during the battle than any other battle on American soil either before or since.
The battle occurred on absolutely beautiful Pennsylvania farmland and, now that the blood and body parts are gone, the area is again gorgeous. There are many monuments within the park with some terrific statues of fighting men and dignified looking gentlemen although I imagine they did not look so spiffy back in July 1863. There is a great auto tour through Gettysburg National Military Park which we drove with signs marking the locations of units, furthest lines of advance, places of horrible, lingering deaths for the wounded and little signs to keep you on the right roads. It was very warm today and I imagine the weather was not too different back in 1863. Just keeping water flowing to the fighters must have been a nightmare because, in this gently rolling land, there is no place to hide from sharpshooters. Except on the ridges, there is little shade.
There must have been some kind of biker event in the town because there were thousands of Harley riders here today. Harleys are made in York, about an hour away. Surprisingly, almost all of the bikers, including those with chubby women on the back, were quite rotund and back tires got a workout.
There’s some pix. Click the asterisk at the end of this sentence to see them *

We awoke with big plans to go off exploring but the plans sort of went south. We took leisurely showers. We went over to Shari’s trailer next door and hobnobbed with her while playing with her big, happy brown Lab, Gus. I dumped the tanks and caught up on my blog stuff because the wifi here does work although it could not be described as fast. We had cocktails. This traveling stuff is fun.

Today we took a spin on back roads south of our campground in a search for more old, architecturally stunning buildings and we were amply rewarded. The number of magnificent old buildings in this part of Pennsylvania is staggering and little searching is required to find treasures.
On the way, Peggy found a place called the Meadows, housed in a building that looked like a 1950s drive-in. They served frozen custard, something those of us in the west don’t see much of, and frozen yogurt and something called Italian Ices. Peggy got a medium frozen custard which turned out to be three generous scoops on a sugar cone. I can’t imagine what a large must look like. I had a chocolate shake and I do not know whether they used yogurt or custard but it was very tasty.
We continued into Abbottstown, another old Pennsylvania town with magnificent old buildings. They must have had a couple generations of superb architects around here and they left a wonderful legacy.
We made an effort to get onto single lane back roads and we ended up spotting many terrific houses and farms. Check out the blog pictures from July 6th, 7th and 9th to get an idea how many gorgeous places there are here.
We got a few pictures. To see them click the asterisk at the end of this line *

Today was a travel day. We packed up our stuff and departed from PA Dutch TT, allowing us respite from the daylight hours semi-automatic and shotgun fire in the nearby shooting range. A shooting range next to a camping area with hundreds of spaces would seem to be a foolish zoning arrangement.
We zigzagged through rural Pennsyvania, going vaguely east for the first time on this year’s trip. We reached our furthest penetration east for this year when we drove into Delaware a few days ago and now we start our journey back toward the west coast, hopefully arriving in San Diego around mid-November. We passed through fields with Amish farmers in them, harvesting crops by hand. The farms here were gorgeous. We crossed the Susquehanna River again, this time on old US-30. We passed the Harley factory in York and continued on to Gettysburg Farm TT in East Berlin. Berlin is pronounced BER-lin here instead of ber-LIN like the German city.
It is a nice campground but I arranged our trailer such that I could not get the satellite antenna to work so there won’t be any TV for the next few days. When we were here in 2015, there was no wifi but now it has been installed. Soon, I will know if it works.
There’s pix. Click here

We spent our final full day in Manheim area taking a cruise up to Palmyra, Jonestown and Annville, three tiny towns north of the campground. On our way out we noticed a sign on the adjacent camp space that indicated the names of the tenants was Schittler. We have camped alongside many folks with strange names but the Schittlers and the Succos (2015 Texas) both have names that, were they mine, I would not advertise.
Our drive north initially passed through Jonestown, then Palmyra and finally through Annville. Jonestown and Annville are very small but Palmyra is larger and the home of the Beer Cove, a vendor with a good beer selection. We found some Edmund Fitzgerald porter here but no Deschutes Black Butte which we revere as the best. In 2015, we found a couple cases of Black Butte, made in Oregon, here at the Beer Cove but their selection this year was not as complete.
This part of Pennsylvania has an extraordinary number of buildings from the 18th and 19th Centuries and a good number of them are still in use. Throughout today’s drive we spotted absolutely gorgeous houses, churches and municipal buildings, miles of neighborhoods with brick row houses and balconies, and stunning farms. The farms seem to be mostly operated by Mennonite and Amish families and they are very tidy. It is strange to see folks plowing and harrowing with horses but they seem to think it is okay. They seem like nice folks that live without indoor plumbing, radios, cars, tractors, the internet, electrical devices, deodorant or bars. Travel is by horse-drawn carriage, bike or scooter. The fruits and vegetables in their roadside stands are beautiful and luscious.
On our way back toward our campground, we came across an old facility called Cornwall Furnace. There are some very stout buildings still standing here that were part of the furnace complex which operated, making iron from nearby ore deposits, from 1742 to 1883. The abbatoir here was very pretty, despite the use.
Check out the pictures. Click here

Today the weather finally quit being horrible with morning temperatures in the upper 60s and clear skies. We didn’t do anything interesting. I dumped the waste tanks. We ate at home.
We did notice that there seems to be a gun range not far from our campground and many folks were out killing clay pigeons and paper targets. Initially, we just thought is was locals fooling around with fireworks but nobody has as many as we heard today. We also have neighbors across the road who have a furry little dog that barks incessantly whenever the family leaves. Fortunately, those wonderful neighbors left this evening after making many scraping and clunking noises as they pulled away with their enormous trailer. I hope I don’t run over any of the metal parts ripped from their trailer as they traveled home.
We had barbecued steaks and corn on the cob for dinner. I really like doing this kind of stuff.