Penultimate Day

November 16, 2023 – Day 48

We pulled out of French Creek State Park in Elverson PA to make it halfway home. We’re on the second to last day. The “penultimate” day. Paul had that word as a vocabulary word in High School and has always been amused by it, it is certainly a $20 word when a 50¢ word will do. This is completely unlike his other favorite weird-word, which is “defenestrate.” Paul always wondered why such a word was needed, “To throw out a window” is pretty specific. And Wikipedia comes to the rescue.

Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the Thirty Years’ War. This was done in “good Bohemian style”, referring to the defenestration which had occurred in Prague’s New Town Hall almost 200 years earlier (July 1419), and on that occasion led to the Hussite war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration

And yes, this could be on the quiz. (susan here: “Transfenestrate”, however, will not be on the quiz.)

But back to our second to last day. You might be amused by re-reading how we left French Creek State Park earlier this year and pressed on to home in one day. Looking back I can’t believe we did that. Then again, we were probably tired of living in a 19 foot trailer. It was also day 56, not day 48. We did consider getting breakfast at that diner. But we had already eaten there once for dinner. Paul’s dinner was not very good. Susan had breakfast and it wasn’t as good she had remembered it. So we just made a ton of eggs and peppers and tomatoes and onions and just ate ourselves silly. Should be enough to hold us until lunch. (susan here: but when it’s Paul he’s hungry 11 minutes after eating. So all bets were off.)

We pack up and drove away. Susan drove the loop around the campground and Paul just stayed behind and drove the wrong way down the one way road just to get the side shot.

Remember a few blogs ago that Paul commented how the trees and hills looked normal. Now the houses were starting to look normal, the old ones are made of stone!

Lots and lots of stone buildings. Some of these buildings were covered in a stucco. This was not one of them.

This is also silo country. They were everywhere.

I guess you mostly put grain in a silo, at least an agricultural silo. We also passed corn fields so maybe corn goes in them. This one has a creepy looking church next to a hard to see creepy graveyard. Susan gets to whip out the useless, trivial vocabulary here. A graveyard is next to a church, a cemetery is a larger, spread out deal that’s not associated with a church. Bet you didn’t know that. Since we’ve used creepy a few times now, let’s make it creepier by showing it in black and white. You can just imagine the (Full stop here, it is March 15, 2024 and we’re finally getting around to looking at all these old blog entries, and you know what, neither of us can remember what you were supposed to imagine. Oopsie!)

We pulled into Schodack Island State Park in NY around 4:15 p.m. The sun was already setting. Schodack Island is just south Albany, NY. That the big highway bridge up there is over the Hudson you can see through the trees and dead bugs. Its route 912M. We’re sure that’s really important to you.

The site was amazingly level. The power pole was near the middle of the site but we still we able to reach it without having to move the coach too far forward or unhitch the Jeep. Paul immediately setup the radio because he was in a state park and great for more FIPs. (You do remember FIPs right? That will also be on the quiz. Fake Internet Points.)

You can see he is using bottles of RV Antifreeze as weights to stabilize the antenna. His facebook radio friends were amused, “I can see how you keep the signals from freezing up.” Nerds.

You might be wondering why we went all the way up to the Albany area, crossing at Rensselaer, then back down to under the I-90 bridge. Google maps has us crossing that bridge. I have no idea why Garmin took us that way, it is possible we would have had to go down an unsuitable street or cross a bridge with a low weight limit. Or maybe Garim is just an idiot in a box. (susan here: or maybe there are only so many crossing spots.)

Almost home. We’re both happy about that and sad that another epic adventure is about to end.

Daily: 253

Return Total: 2,980

Return Overall Miles/Day: 331

Return Driving Miles/Day: 186

Overall Total: 6,116

Total Driving Miles/Day: 340

mpg: 6.8