The 2021 Condo Trip, Part II: The Main Event

 This is the second of 3 posts covering this trip. You really should read them in order. Here's a link to the first part.

The photo album for this entire trip can be viewed here. The pictures are in chronological order, with captions. All the pictures in this post and the succeeding two posts are part of that album.

  MY FRIEND KILBY lives in southeastern Pennsylvania, and I'd invited him and his wife to join us for any or all of our condo week. "Dubois?" he said; "There's nothing to do up there." But he came anyway, just for an overnight visit (though his wife stayed home -- dog-sitter unavailable, a completely valid excuse with this group of tourists). 

Kilby is both right and wrong about this area. DuBois itself, a town of about 7,000 people, is as dull as a central Pennsylvania burg can be in the reflected glow of a never-very-bright past. They had their big local celebration the first weekend we were here, and we would not have known it had we not tried to get to a local supermarket; that block of thoroughfare was closed for the fireworks show.

But DuBois sits amid miles and miles of gorgeous heavily-forested high rolling hills (called mountains, but let's be real here), and those forests contain plenty to keep jaded city folk happy as a tornado in a trailer park.

where's that Sasquatch?

Normally we start our Condo trips with a day-long discussion of what to do when, but this time we had to put it off, because there was a "must" event going on that day and we couldn't miss it: the First Annual Forest County Sasquatch Hunt and Bigfoot-Calling Contest, taking place in Marienville, a couple of hours north of DuBois, in the Adirondack National Forest. We spent the entire day roaming around the forest on a scavenger hunt, looking for life-sized cutouts of the famously reclusive critter placed around the area. One was easy to find, mounted on the side of the old train station (although we drove past it three times), while the rest were more or less hidden among the trees. We found eight of the ten cutouts; the other two were west of town, and since we didn't know the local road names, we had no clue which area to look in. Still, lots of fun, and such pretty scenery. We grabbed dinner from a barbecue vendor at the festival proper in town (not that good, but then it's Pennsylvania, not Kansas City and certainly not Texas) and listened to the Sasquatch Calling competition before heading back, happy and tired, to DuBois.

Kilby came up the next morning, and after introductions and lunch at the nearby Station 101, we headed off to Horseshoe Curve, where the Pennsylvania Railroad laid its route through the mountains. It's one of the busiest stretches of railroad in the country. During our visit -- not that long a time -- four extremely long trains passed through, and there were a number of people there to witness it. It's a Famous Place and popular with tourists and locals alike. There's a small museum to round out the trainspotting experience.

Bilger's Rocks

fat-man squeeze

The next day, after Kilby had headed off home to the Amish Country, we went back in that same direction, towards Altoona, to clamber around on Bilger's Rocks. These are some privately-owned granite rocks, open to the public and kept free of government safety measures: no railings, no smoothing of paths through the rocks, no warning signs. Just rocks, and trees, and your own instincts on how to get to the top. It had rained hard just before we got there, and the flat ground around the parking area was soggy, swampy even, but the drops falling from the trees, and the cool dampness of the air, just made the experience all the more fun. It's a great place to feel like kids again.

On Tuesday, we made a circuit through the northern parts of Pennsylvania. First stop was the Kinzua Sky Bridge, an observation deck built on the remnants of a railroad trestle that was taken down by a tornado in 2003. From 300 feet in the air, you can look down on the twisted remains of a dozen towers that once held up the rail trestle.

Kinzua Sky Bridge

From there we hit the Zippo Lighter company's museum in Bradford. I made it as far as the movie theater, where they show a 2-minute history of the company. I fell asleep there, and saw nothing of the museum before everyone else was ready to go. We swung by the Serenity Glass Park in Port Allegheny, which was billed as "celebrating the history of glass." Actually it was all about glass block manufacture, which is much less interesting. The park -- the size of one city building lot -- was definitely not worth the 20-minute-each-way drive to get there. 

Our last stop was the Smethport Mansion District. In the 1880s and 1890s, Smethport was one of the wealthiest towns in the country, and was home to one of the wealthiest men in the land: Harry Hamlin, banker extraordinaire. His bank is still around, a shadow of its former self; so is his house, and the houses of everyone related to him or closely involved with his business. And a few others. 

To be perfectly candid, few of these houses were really impressive enough to call "mansions". Most were the sort of medium-large Victorian houses one sees in every town of sufficient age. A number of Smethport's were in need of a hefty dose of TLC, but a few were well-maintained and recently restored. I walked nearly the entire half-mile of the "District" before I decided I should take a picture or two, and even then only to be able to prove I was there. 

best view

We spent all of Wednesday in one place, Pine Creek Gorge. Billed as "Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon," it's not a canyon at all, but a valley, carved by glaciers. There's a Rim Trail on the western side, from which one can see very little of the valley, as the underbrush on the hillside has been allowed to grow up far enough to block the views. On the eastern side, trails run down from top to bottom, and there's a Rail Trail, a former railway bed that runs the entire length of the valley, some 40 miles. We hiked the Turkey Trail, which passes two waterfalls on its way down. Jeff and I turned back after the first waterfall; Sherry and Nancy went on to the second, but didn't go quite all the way down.

On the way back to DuBois, we stopped near Benezette to have a look at a few of the elk that form large herds in north-central Pennsylvania Shortly after that, an elk on the roadside decided to have an up-close look at us, but we just managed to avoid too close an encounter.

On Thursday, our last full day of Condo Week, we drove over to Clearfield, the county seat, to see the Grice Clearview Community Museum, an odd collection of trophy animals and old cars, all jammed higgledy-piggledy into a warehouse-style building with a huge collection of die-cast toys and a replica of the Sinclair service station that started the Grice family's fortunes. 

1947 Crosley

Almost every antique automobile museum in the country began as one person's personal collection, and no matter how long that person's been gone, the collection still reflects his own personal taste. (I don't know of any where the original collector was a woman.) Mr. Grice's tastes tend toward the flamboyant. While most of the cars are traditional American vehicles from the 1930s to the 1980s, with emphasis on Fords and Chevys, there is an unusual number of oddities, apparently collected in all seriousness: a Volkswagen Beetle modified with a Rolls-Royce grille (I remember when those were popular, back in the '60s); a Cadillac Eldorado with longhorn hood ornament, a continental kit on the back and two side-mounted spare-tire compartments; a Chevy Nomad station wagon modified into a pickup truck; a Stutz Blackhawk reboot from the 1970s. These are the vehicles that give the collection its peculiar flavour -- that, and the weird juxtaposition of stuffed game animals. This collection is not that of a wealthy sophisticate collecting cars with an eye toward future value; this is the collection of a wealthy but simple man who could afford to indulge his own whims. (He also collected thousands of die-cast automobile models; if I wanted to fault his tastes, it would be because I found only one Jaguar among the lot of them, and none among the full-size car collection!)

tree growing out of a rock several feet off the ground

We left the Grice Museum and, after grabbing lunch at a nice little diner down the road, Billie's, we headed over the other side of DuBois, to a place we'd heard about from the woman in the condo next to ours: Cook Forest. This state park features an area of virgin forest -- unusual in heavily-logged Pennsylvania. It was quite an exertion for a group of people nearing seven decades on earth; well, for some of them, anyway.
The hike we chose started with a climb -- a pretty steep climb -- of about 250 feet, but after that it was fairly level, and about two and a half miles all together, ending with a "swinging bridge" that bounced more than swung.

We closed out our Condo Week with the Once-a-Year Bowling League, this time at DuBois Lanes, just about the only thing we did in the town that was our home base for the week. I bowled the worst two games of my entire life, so there's nothing to report.