Food that Exist : Central Pennsylvania Visit

I visited my boyfriend up in Pennsylvania for a few days before I headed to Northern Virginia to start my grown-up life. So it was a bit of childhood fun before I left.


I almost didn't make it though. To cut down on traveling (and money), I decided to fly from Birmingham (an airport with 15 gates) to Scranton (an airport with also not many gates). It was fine and dandy until an hour-and-a-half ground delay into Charlotte due to thunderstorms. We made it to Charlotte, two minutes after my Scranton flight left. Instead, I ran to get onto a Harrisburg flight (thankfully, Alex lives pretty much between the two, and there was enough time to call and have him change his plans).

So, after an adventurous trip there, had to have an adventurous time too, right?


We started on Sunday with a family reunion.

Monday dawned drizzly (as predicted), so Alex and I drove an impressive trip through central PA. We hit a few of his favorite state parks, as well as the cheapest diner I've ever been to for breakfast. They also served scrapple, a food that I had never eaten until going to Montour County.

Tuesday was much nicer than planned, which meant that our afternoon at Knoebel's, "America's Best Theme Park", was remarkably pleasant. It was only slightly chilly on the log flume, but wonderfully breezy on the flier (where you could control the height with a fin on the plane!)

That night was the Montour-DeLong County Fair Pie and Cake Auction, where I finagled some Hersey bar brownies for a steal at $2. There was also a tractor pull, with a hillside full of spectators.

Wednesday, we had to pack in everything that was left. First was the Falls Hike, with an amazing amount of amazing waterfalls. Next was a stop at the Mennonite store for a shoo fly pie. It was a notable event, since I didn't know shoo fly pies existed until a month ago. (Then I ate a piece of the molasses deliciousness.)

We spent the remainder of the afternoon at a local lake, kayaking. I still have the blister to prove it. Two deer, a few herons, three turtles, and a raptor catching a fish proved that it indeed housed nature. (Then, when we got back, I ate another piece of pie.)

My final Pennsylvania experience was going out for some good ole bluegrass. Anyone who brought an instrument could play, and I recognized some of the songs as hymns. Drinking the Yuengling Lager, too.


On Thursday, we drove to my grandparent's house outside D.C. Goodbye, my former state home! Hello, new home, Virginia.

Georgia Peaches : Family Vacation

The time has been filled with a bunch of events since my mom, sister, and I got back from Europe. The day after we got back (to the East Coast, mind you), we drove down to North Carolina for a cousin's wedding, where we met up with Dad and Deanne who drove up after flying into Atlanta. The next day (Saturday) was the wedding.

It was at a beautiful plantation house an hour from our hotel. The service lasted only ten minutes or so, but the rest of the evening was a fun get-together with family. A lot of this family I'm going to be much closer to now, so it was fun to reconnect and realize that I could see them more often. 

The wedding was on a hot (though not quite oppressively so) evening, so we dipped our feet in the pool before dancing. The photographer when in up to his chest to get the picture he wanted, so he was already wet when he waded into the knee-deep fountain nearby. Soon, four of us cousins were splashing around in there too. 

The next day, we set off for Georgia. Val and I got dropped off at the condo. Deanne got taken to the airport. We made tacos. 

The following days have been making our own excitement in a condo in rural Georgia. We bought a peck of peaches (yum). We have a puzzle out. We went to the Bavarian Village of Helen. We climbed up and down Tullulah Gorge. We made dinner. It's the right kind of vacation. 

And today's adventure to the gorge was pretty awesome. We didn't know that there was a sliding rock waterfall at the end of the trail, but when we got there, we jumped in despite our lack of swimsuits. It was super slippery (guess that's why they call it a sliding rock) so Dad and I have little scrapes and awesome memories. 

One Mom, Two Daughters: (Another) Europe Trip!

For the next few weeks, I'll be blogging with my mom and other sister at 1mom2daughters.wordpress.com. And it will have pictures!

How Many Days Until Corinne Gets Bored?, or Home Again

So I'm back in my hometown, living with my parents for a month before heading to the East Coast via Europe. (I should make this a trend... can't go cross-country without going international.)

And I've been back for 11 days. And today was my first day of stir-craziness. It makes sense, because I haven't been home for 11 days since I left for CMU in 2007. (Exaggeration, but not by much.)


I started going through some boxes I left behind, and am thinking I'll still probably leave behind. They contained yearbooks, journals, and letters, so much of my time today was spent looking through those.


I wasn't a constant journal writer like my older sister, Maria. I found a years' worth of entries from third grade (where I spelled "actually" as "acculy"), then a constant stream from sixth to seventh grade (where we moved and I spelled "actually" as "acualy"). I spent quite a while reading them, and was entertained, frustrated by my handwriting, and reminiscing about some of the people that I'm still friends with (and some that I'm not).


I'll probably still leave those with my parents, since I feel like whatever apartment I move into probably won't be a place I'll want to store pounds of old memories. It is nice to have a free storage space in Mom and Dad's house.

In other news, yesterday Mom and I went to the Sculpture Park in Seattle. (I loved it. Sculpture is one of my favorite kinds of art.)

And in final news, one of my first entries about being in the Pacific Northwest from 2001 was the indignation that it was August and we were wearing sweatshirts. Today, I went jogging. And I could see my breath. Thank you, June.

Delay, or Day 31 in London, Vancouver B.C., and home!

My flights were actually scheduled very nicely for today, with a flight straight to Vancouver than a quick hop to Seattle. What wasn't as convenient was the hour layover (that was shortened by a late plane, then further made useless by going through all of the American customs rigamarole).

So the bus went smooth, the strike that threatened earlier this week was resolved, and the first flight was slightly delayed. I enjoyed my nine hours of quality entertainment (Justin Bieber's "Never Say Never" and a comedy called "Cedar Rapids" among them). The trick, so I've heard, is to stay awake going west. The meals, snacks, and drinks all certainly helped.

Our flight was delayed by five minutes, which is usually not an issue, but with an hour of customs proceedings, no one from the London flight made it to the Seattle flight. There were about ten of us, and we all got seats and a lovely additional hour-long layover, plus an another hour due to technical difficulties.  

However, the plane eventually got off the ground with me on it, and in Seattle I was. My parents and littlest sister picked me up in their day-old Nissan Leaf, and we had a Fathers' Day dinner with my old exchange student and her husband. He's a chatty one, and also named Alex, so we commiserated about their similarities.

I was on my fourth or fifth wind at this point, and the final leg of the drive back to our house was a feat of awakeness. I brought down gifts to bestow, and with that, I gave up the sleep fight (it had been 22 hours of sleeplessness at this point).

On Death, or Day 30 in Oban, Glasgow, and London

Our 7:45 bus was an early wake-up call, but with our early bedtime last night, it was pretty bearable, made even more so by the cold breakfast and packed lunch from our B&B hostess. We had all sorts of treats hanging on our door this morning to enjoy later in the day.

We didn't have to run to this bus, for the first time in a while. It was a pretty, quiet (and pretty quiet) ride. We woke up before getting to Loch Lomond, so were able to see one area of the country that wasn't on our itinerary (but the surrounding national park is definitely worth exploring in the future).

This was one of the few travel legs that was planned out before we left from the US, since we had to get to London tonight for our flights in the morning (well, afternoon for Alex, but he's probably headed to the airport at early o'clock with me tomorrow).

 
We had a five-hour layover in Glasgow that was originally for sight-seeing. However, we got to Central Station from the bus terminal, and both of us just sat, a bit exhausted with travelling.

The snacks we still had left from Ben Nevis gave us a boost, and we headed to the cathedral in Glasgow, meandering through a few other pedestrian streets and squares in Glasgow on the way.

Our trip was made a bit more urgent by bodily needs, so we got close to the cathedral, and I saw a free exhibit and ducked inside without really seeing what it was.

Turned out the museum we used so indiscriminately for a bathroom was St. Mungo's Museum of Religious Life and Arts. Doesn't sound so interesting, but on the first floor was an exhibit on rituals of life and death in a variety of cultures.

The second floor was a temporary exhibit that was on death and the belief in afterlife. The artist took a research approach to the exhibit with people filling out questionnaires, speaking into a recorder, or getting interviewed. One of the most interesting videos was the artist's son (8 years old) interviewing a grief counselor. He thought of the questions himself, and they were really intense in their inquiries. The one that was most innocent was what is one thing you have to do before you die?

After a laugh, the interviewee answered that it is most important to live. He expressed that every moment he is living is like his last, so he gives it his utmost attention. This was a spark of a conversation between Alex and me, and taking about really, it's the balance of the past, present, and future that create a full life, not the exclusion of any of them for the maximization of another.

It then also seemed appropriate that we next visited the cathedral next door, with a very intense necropolis on the hill by it. We gazed a bit at the massive columns before heading back to Central Station.

We made sure to stop by Gregg's, our bakery of choice, for our afternoon nourishment.

The train ride went through some beautiful countryside, both Scottish and English. We dinnered on filled rolls, fried chicken, crisps, and other things in our packed lunches from the morning. Margaret was a good "mom" to us, but I think we're both excited to get back to our real families tomorrow.

We arrived at London Euston (on the north end of town, I think) at 9:31, 7 minutes ahead of schedule. A trip and a transfer on the Underground and a bus later, we were at the hotel at 12:37am. Doesn't seem like it should have taken that long, does it? Tomorrow will be my last day of "travel" blog before I go back to my typical blogging (aka, probably not daily).

Travelers' Curse, or Day 29 in Oban, Mull, and Iona

The travelers' curse. Anytime you want nice weather, it rains, and anytime the weather doesn't matter (like on a travel day), it's sunny.

So we planned our trip to the islands of Mull and Iona today. And, as the curse would have it, we had a lovely drizzle to start the morning.

The daytrip, put together by Bowman's Tours, is a 45-minute ferry from Oban to Mull. Mull is the third largest of Scotland's islands (excluding the fact that Scotland itself is part of an island). The ferry was less windy and cold then others we've been on, so I appreciated being able to go on deck to see the coastline and the castles with minimal frigidness (and only a few Germans). Alex was giddy, pointing at islands saying, "Can we go there?" Clearly another location we have to return to.

We got to Mull, and got on a bus to take us across the island (maybe 40 miles). The driver, Alastair, was a local, having grown-up on the island and raised his kids there. He slowly chatted throughout the hour-and-fifteen bus ride to the next ferry. We were told to look out for otters, seals, and deer, but on the way there, the only thing we saw was sheep.

Around noon, after trying not to drift off during the bus ride, we got to the ferry to Iona. In the first three minutes, we saw a seal disappear around the bow. And then we just watched as the ferry coasted back and forth between the islands. It didn't tie up to a dock when it got to the slipway, so either the gangplank (which was big enough for cars) or some underwater anchor held it in place as we got off on the island.

Iona is about 3 miles by 1.5 miles, so instead of touring the abbey, as most people were apt to do with their 2.5 hours ashore, we started walking north.

Staffa Island was nearly in sight, through the haze that covered everything. Fingal's Cave, with basalt columns and puffins is that islands claim to fame, but neither could be seen, even when we walked through a sheep pasture at the far north end of the island.

The pasture was treacherously covered in sheep and horse droppings, but the wind got intense once we got out of the shelter of even the few buildings and up on a knoll in the middle of it. My raincoat hood was snapping at my ears, and the rain became driving. On the west side of the island were sand dunes with sea grass and crashing waves over black, sharp, volcanic rock. We stood there as long as we could before heading back.

The rain had picked up, and the light sprinkle had developed into sharp droplets that pelted through our jeans and hoods. The mile or two back to the village was head-down, hood-up. We fell bedraggled into a hotel for some warm drinks and a bit of slow Internet. We felt human again before heading back to the village for some browsing and ferrying back to Mull.

Our bus driver welcomed us back, chatted a bit, pointed out some deer, and then let us nap for a bit. I was trying to stay awake to watch for otter and waterfalls, but did my fair share of nodding off. We got back to the original ferry, and waited in line (with me jumping for warmth) to get back to Oban.

We were actually nearly dry (except our feet) when we got back to Oban around 6. The thought of going out again wasn't appealing, so we looked at half a dozen places for dinner before choosing an empty Irish pub. It seems that every menu has to have macaroni and cheese and lasagna on it. We split some nachos, a burger, some lasanga, and had probably our final Scottish beer of the trip, a nice smooth Belhaven.

After chatting with the owner of our B&B, Margaret, and her dog, we dried and went to bed. I think I was asleep before 10:30pm.