Loyalsock Creek, before the heavy flooding

Ironically, the Forksville Folk Festival was happening during the first few days of our stay, but I disciplined myself not to go up and get into it. It was probably mostly rained out anyway, and I really wanted to stick to my guns about cutting ourselves off from people for a while. Maybe next year I’ll check it out.

I didn’t take many pictures since it was raining most of the time. I actually spent more time playing with the video camera getting footage of all the wildlife (so I’d have a record of what to place in the ark after we built it). We saw lots of chipmunks around our cabin, a few toads, and the usual large moths and grasshoppers. Out and about we saw a heron, a large turtle, deer, turkey, and some other large birds that may have been eagles, but we couldn’t tell.

The campground was very quiet and there were bathrooms nearby on two sides of us. Our cabin was handicapped accessible, so we had a bit more room than some of the other folks, but all of the sites seemed to be laid out pretty well.

Audra developed a nightly ritual of “draw-ring time” (pronounced in a Cockney accent) creating a different picture each night with her colored markers. My favorite is the Unintentionally African-American Shakespeare Due to Lack of Caucasian Flesh Tones. Most nights I dabbled with my notes on the computer or read my books. We had the laptop for writing, but no Internet, so it was easier to focus and not get interrupted by all the messages I usually get (when I got home I had 79 messages at home, and over 150 at work).

The cabin had electric outlets, an electric stove and a refrigerator. So if you wanted, you wouldn’t have to cook over a fire. Of course, we’re used to cooking outside because we usually go tent camping. Audra makes some pretty nice meals even under those conditions. But this time around, the stove turned out to be a good thing because of the rain. There were only two nights that we were able to make a fire. Both of them got rained on towards the end of the cooking process. In the one case, Audra had forgotten to thaw out the salmon, so we had to let it thaw by the fire. The result was an awesome smoked salmon! Another dinner started as turkey sausage and fried potatoes, but when the sausage turned out to be too thawed out and crumbly, it turned out to be a combo meal that started on the fire and was finished over the electric stove. Audra was upset that she never got her toasted marshmallows.

We got slightly bored here and there, and just needed to stretch to keep our muscles from atrophying, so we went out to see what some of the local towns were like. On one day we went to Eagles Mere, a ritzy resort town. They had a nice book store where I got “The American Song Bag,” a book of old blues, roots and country songs that turned out to be quite useful when I was looking for stuff to practice.

Audra went swimming one day before the flooding started, so I got a chance to do some recording in the cabin. It was a nice experiment, but I doubt I have anything too usable.

Draw-ring time

Continued...