Day 1: Fall 2023 Adventure: Where 2 Now? North Abington Township, PA

Weather can be mean. Unknown whether weather knows it is mean. Hope all people safe from Hurricane Lee. For this adventure we had planned on staying fairly close to home and traveling around Southern Maine. Gert some seafood. See some ocean. Go places we had not been and maybe a few that we had. Like L.L. Bean. But you know, weather. We replanned and selected a different destination. But what to do about the seafood?

We departed at 1120 after exciting things like taking a few years of waste motor oil to the hazardous waste collection centre (it only happens a few times a year) and watching F1 qualifying.

First stop, myusaddress.ca in Ogdensburg, NY to pick up some RV tank heaters I had ordered. Next stop. Price Chopper to provision. PC has live lobster and a steamer. This was to be our seafood fix. Problem #1. Steamer was broken. No worries, we’ll take them live and cook them one at a time in our little pot. After provisioning we discovered problem #2; the pot would not hold even a single lobster. No problem, Walmart is across the road so off we go to get a pot. Magnetic of course so we can use it on the portable induction cooktop.

Stop and get some gas. Good thing I remembered the magic for verifying the “zip” code on a credit card transaction when you have a “postal code”. The attendant dude was outside and gave me the reminder as well. Friendly of him. BTW, the secret is to just use the numbers part of your postal code and then pad the end with two zeros.

Off we go, out of Ogdensburg at 1259, one minute ahead of schedule. A new pot and four new lobster friends. Some other food too.

Problem #3: We were going to just sleep at a Cracker Barrel somewhere but that would have meant cooking the lobster inside. No can do. We scouted campgrounds and decided on Lackawanna State Park near Scranton, PA. Let’s book it online. Partially selected due to the cool name.

Problem #4: Can’t book sites at the park after 1200 on the day of arrival. No problem, let’s call. After getting cut off a few times due to cell coverage gaps, we pulled over and made the call. BTW, good job NY on having all of the “Text Stop” areas. Pretty much guaranteed to get cell coverage there! Nice person on the phone told us about Problem #5. All the remaining sites were first come, first served and the office was closed so we would have to just pick a vacant site and take it. We decided to take the chance. Off we go.

Good news, the park entrance gate was staffed. We picked our site and settled in to several hours of lobster cooking, processing, consuming and cleaning. Van may smell like lobster for the next while. We barely had gotten rid of the crawdad smell from the spring!

Lobster fest was all good. It was work, but worth it. I took the hard bits over to the main dumpster far from our campsite.

None of our problems were significant. Mostly just little bumps and easy to get past.

That’s about it for day 1. I shall fire up AllTrails and find a walking route for tomorrow morning. Then we depart for our next stop. Can’t arrive before 1400.