Wednesday the water was out in the C loop here at the Hershey Thousand Trails because somebody ran over a water bib and broke it. When we woke up yesterday morning the power was out in the whole park and they had also shut off the water until the power came back on. So basically, we were dry camping.
Our house batteries were really low. So low that I couldn’t start our Onan diesel generator. I had to use the Auxiliary Battery Boost switch, which adds the coach starting batteries into the circuit, to help start the generator. I let it run for an hour or so to charge the batteries up, and then we decided to shut it down and go play for the day.
I’m not sure what the problem with the electric was, but when we left the campground a little after noon there were a couple of bucket trucks from the local power company working on the lines a mile or so down the road. Sometime in mid-afternoon somebody posted on Facebook that the power was back on.
A couple of years ago we upgraded our Thousand Trails membership to the Elite package, which added the Outdoor World and Mid-Atlantic campgrounds to our camping inventory. Like with any campground membership, it only pays off if you use it. In our case it has worked out very well for us.
One of the new campgrounds we have access to is Pennsylvania Dutch Country, which is an Outdoor World property only about twelve miles away from the Hershey Thousand Trails. Gypsy Journal subscribers Mike and Reggi Wallace, whom we saw at the Long Beach, Washington Thousand Trails last summer, are workamping at Pennsylvania Dutch Country and had invited us over to drop off a bundle of sample issues and to say hello.
We visited for a while and then Reggi took us on a tour of the campground. It’s a nice place, though the heavy tree cover does make getting a satellite TV signal difficult in some sites. On the other hand, I had five bars of 4G Verizon service on my Samsung Galaxy 5. We are looking forward to staying there sometime.
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Acting under the premise that you can never have too much yarn, yesterday we set out for the little community of Bird In Hand to visit Labadie Looms, a weaving shop we discovered on our last trip to this area. Donna Beaver, the nice lady who owns the store, is a direct descendant of Lege de la Bouchelle, a French Huguenot who arrived in the Colonies in 1683 with a Pietist group known as the Labadists. We chatted with her and a customer who was working on a project on one of the shop’s big floor looms, and Terry bought a few skeins of beautiful hand spun Marino yarn.
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In the past we have always enjoyed poking through the Old Village Store in Bird In Hand, where they used to have everything from Amish souvenirs to antiques, and a lot of things you couldn’t find anywhere else, like butter churns, rolls of flypaper, Fels Naptha soap, or maybe a washboard, straw hat, or a cane fishing pole. But this time it seemed like most of the store has become just a typical Amish-themed souvenir shop. We were in and out in just a few minutes.
We took the long way back home, driving two lane back roads past fields full of tall corn and others where Amish farmers were working their crops with horses. We were in no hurry to get anywhere, just poking along enjoying the scenery and being together.
I’m not sure what’s on our schedule for today, because we don’t have a schedule. I have a few days before I have to get cranking on the new issue of the paper, and I’m waiting for the second edit of my new book to get back to me so I can get it ready to publish, so I’m sort of betwixt and between. I see a nap in my future. Image may be NSFW.
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Have you entered this week’s Free Drawing yet? This week’s prize is an audiobook of Maximum Security, the third book in my friend Carol Ann Newsome’s excellent Dog Park mystery series. To enter, all you have to do is click on the Free Drawing link or on the Free Drawings tab at the top of this page and enter your name in the comments section at the bottom of that page (not this one). Only one entry per person per drawing please, and you must enter with your real name. To prevent spam or multiple entries, the names of cartoon or movie characters are not allowed. The winner will be drawn Sunday evening.
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Thought For The Day – Dear Math, please grow up and solve your own problems, I’m tired of solving them for you.
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