Catching Up!

 

Harper's Ferry from a Church on the Hill

After a long silence I will try to catch up with this blog.  I was stuck in Rochester with health issues and car issues for 3 weeks.  My 8 year old car with 170,000 miles on it has been replaced with a new (to me) Honda Pilot which will tow the Airstream better because it tows more weight.  My first night out of Rochester I headed for a campground in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.  The campground is on the grounds of an old farm.  The trouble was that the ground was so soggy from Hurricane Lee 1 month before that it couldn't be used.  The owner said he had a spot for me and here it is in front of the barns.  After that anyone who came in was told there was not a spot for them because they would have to be towed out.

I headed for Harper's Ferry, West Virginia which is a beautiful place besides the historical significance of John Brown's raid.  In addition to the raid Meriwether Lewis came to Harper's Ferry to have some guns made at the federal armory and to have a boat made for the expedition across the country to the Pacific Ocean. 

The C&O Canal bed

There is a place to get onto the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Path and I took a walk up that path as I have wanted to do for a long time.  The canal was built just as the railroads were being built and since the railroad beat the canal to the destination work was stopped on the canal.

Gooney Creek

I headed for Virginia to drive down Skyline Drive and visit my cousin in Charlottesville.  On the way I stopped at Gooney Creek Campground and had a wonderful creekside site.   The campground is owned and run by an 84 year old woman who was a realtor in DC for 37 years and set out to buy a business.  A beautiful place with no Verizon signal it floods every now and then.

After a wonderful visit with my cousin Tim who teaches psychology at the University of Virginia and who gave me a copy of his new book, I drove to Appomattox  Court House to tour the site where General Lee surrendered.

Here are the house and the parlor where the surrender took place.

I had some trouble with my hitch as it had to be altered to the height of the new car.  Trouble with the antisway bars led me to a Camping World in Winchester Virginia.  They were very busy but I could not unhitch the car so the service manager looked at the hitch.  He showed me that the bars would loosen and gave me some advice.  He did not charge me at all and now I am comfortable hitching up and unhitching.