#45 - Coveys Great Adventure – May 2018 – PA, NY, MA, CT, NH

May 2018 – PA, NY, MA, CT, NH  

April’s frantic pace continued into May. Seven campgrounds in five states made another very hectic month.  

In 2016 we visited Fort Sumter where the Civil War started, and in April we toured Appomattox where it ended. One of our main goals this trip was to see Gettysburg, the turning point of the war.




Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Gardners, Pennsylvania is really nice. The Appalachia Mountain Trail runs through the park and the Trail museum is located there. The park had just opened for the season and we had the place almost to ourselves during the week. With the A.T. running right through, hiking and dog walking were terrific. The only negative was the complete lack of cell service for miles in any direction. About 20 miles from Gettysburg, the park is centrally located to also tour Mechanicsburg, York, and the river towns of Lemoyne, Wormsleyburg and Enola. If you are in the area, the York Agricultural and Industrial Museum is worth a visit.

I have read about the battle at Gettysburg for decades, but I wasn’t prepared for the impact of the place. If ghosts do exist, many of them must live there. The amount of blood shed on those hills is almost incomprehensible to me. The town of Gettysburg is a marked contrast to the sobering memorials that surround it. There is so much to see and to try to understand that we came back a second day and could have easily filled a third. If we hadn’t been pressed for time to get back for the dogs, we would have spent more time enjoying the many shops and historic buildings.

Camp Elmbois was a real find

Neither of us knew anything about the Finger Lakes region in central New York. We wanted to see the Corning Glass Museum and I picked Camp Elmbois because of the moderate cost and proximity to Corning. It turned out to be a gem. It’s a small campground that has been slowly developed over decades by two generations of one family. We were the first campers of the season to arrive and the resident owners couldn’t have been more accommodating. No AT&T cell service and no TV, but lots of grass to walk the dogs and two ponds with a resident flock of geese for the dogs to pine for.

I’ve probably been to dozens of museums in the past 10 years because I like them. The Corning Museum of Glass is the best curated museum I’ve ever seen. Each aspect of every exhibit is flawless. The layout, lighting, mounting, accessibility and even the labeling were meticulously done. Their collection is so big that the 10,000 objects on display at any time represents about 10% of the material available. The glass technology exhibits are also exceptional. I wish we’d had the time to spend two days there.

Hammondsport turned out to be one the best places we have visited on this 

trip. It is the archetypal “small town on a lake”, with many lovely, immaculately maintained older homes and no fast food chains allowed!  If you go, plan to visit the Village Inn; the bar is a great place to while away the evening.

1911: First amphibian; first retractable
landing gear,first dual-control trainer

Hammondsport is also home to two great small museums: the Glenn Curtis Museum and the Finger Lakes Boating Museum. Curtis is considered by many to be the true father of flight rather than the Wright Brothers. The museum is an eclectic collection of Curtis memorabilia and lots of “stuff” from the local area. One of the highlights is touring the restoration shop where they are working on a WWll P40 fighter that they resurrected from a swamp.

The Finger Lakes Boating Museum was recently gifted by the old Taylor Winery property and is expanding as quickly as they can into twenty buildings that they now own. This region was one of the major pleasure boat building centers in the world from the 1900’s to the early ‘60’s when fiberglass displaced wood construction. The museum has many fine examples by the dozens of small and large boat builders working in the lakes area. Like the Curtis restoration shop, the Boating Museum also has a large work shop and offers many boat building classes. If we lived there, I’d be an avid student.

Bully Hill Winery Art

Did I mention wine? There are literally hundreds of wineries in this region turning out many award winning varietals. We only managed to visit two of them. Fortunately, we can only carry a few cases, so restraint was called for.

From Hammondsport we headed to Cape Cod, but decided to spend a few days in central Massachusetts to break up the drive into manageable chunks. It’s been 45 years since I spent time in this area. In those days my focus was on racing motorcycles, but this time around the beauty of the area really struck both of us. Travelers Rest RV Campground in Bernardston gave us a good base to explore the small towns like Greenfield and Deerfield that dot the area.

The improving economy is evident in the growing number of RV’s that we see on the road  compared to our 2016 trip. It is getting harder to find camp sites, especially when we don’t like to make reservations too far in advance. For people with jobs and families, Memorial Day marks the start of summer vacation and travel season. We wanted to spend a couple of weeks on Cape Cod but soon realized that we were several months late in our planning. Every place we called was booked for the Memorial Day weekend.

We were able to get space for four nights at Scusset Beach State Park, right on the Cape Cod Canal, but had to leave Friday morning to make way for the holiday campers. Scusset Beach was more expensive than any state park we have been to, but the location was pretty great. We walked the dogs along the canal as far as we wanted every day, and talked to the fisherman casting for striped bass in the canal.

I haven’t been to the Cape in over 50 years and it certainly has changed. Many year round residents rent out their houses for the summer and move off the Cape rather than deal with the traffic and crowding everywhere. I’m glad we couldn’t get reservations on the Cape for Memorial Day weekend as it marks the start of “the season”. Judging by the traffic we saw Friday morning coming over the bridge from the mainland, I am glad we were leaving. The back-up was already over five miles long at 9 AM! 

We did have a great time, though. We spent a day driving all the way to Provincetown on the very tip of the Cape, and climbed the Pilgrim Monument tower. The hike was certainly worth it for the panoramic views of the town and the bay. The pilgrims actually landed at Provincetown five weeks before their famous landing at Plymouth. It’s hard to grow crops in sand, which P-town has in abundance.

We spent another day at Hyannis and Hyannis Port, took a harbor tour, visited the Kennedy Museum and ate great fish ‘n chips on the wharf where the fishing boats dock. I can’t imagine what the crowds must be like in July, but in May we had a ball; great weather and no crowds anywhere. If you plan to visit the Cape, go in May.

Four days weren't long enough to even scratch the surface of all the great places to visit on the Cape, but we had to leave. Luckily, one of the parks that we had called to get reservations for Mem-Day had a last minute cancellation, sparing us a holiday weekend in Walmart parking lots. That was the good news; the bad news was that it was really expensive and in Connecticut. Beggars and choosers, etc., so off we went to see what Griswold, CT had to offer.

Countryside RV Park is another family owned and operated park. Family owned parks are usually great places to stay, but all reflect the personalities of the owners in small ways. Our coach was clearly the largest one they could handle, but with careful maneuvering we settled into a spacious site for the weekend. Like Camp Elmbois, the same family has been developing this park for almost 50 years. The showers had been “updated” several times, way beyond the point when they should have been torn down and replaced, but aside from that it was fine. There were a few trails in the woods that the dogs enjoyed, too.

We had a day to kill before we were expected at Casa Kendrick. A quick search and a phone call confirmed that Camp Wally World (Walmart) in Lunenburg, Massachusetts was accepting guests. One of the motocross tracks that I raced on in the ‘60’s was in Lunenburg, but I couldn’t recall anything about the town. In those days all I was interested in was getting to the track in time for practice. The Walmart lot was not packed with truckers running refrigeration units and had a reasonable amount of grass for the dogs, so we all had a good night.

We have been looking forward to seeing Charlie and Mollie Kendrick again for two years. Faithful readers will remember our last visit with them in 2016 when we set out together for the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Their coach broke down i Maine and while waiting for parts we got a call from Liesa that sent us back to Utah at a hectic pace. Rolling back into “our” spot at their place in Campton, New Hampshire felt like we had finally closed the circle. On June 25, we’ll once again set out together for New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Quebec City.