Well, yesterday was a complete bust. It seems that folks in Pennsylvania have little regard for historic monuments…
The day started off pretty well with me managing to get Zeze out the door at 7:12 and on our way. With traffic being exceptionally bad even on two lane back roads we wound up far enough behind the clock at our first stop, OMPS, that we passed it up in favor of the more historic towers in Pennsylvania.
We made it near the first site about seven minutes after my route plan said we should thanks in part to some asshat in an old Chevy C-10 that was overloaded with these huge rocks, who couldn’t push the truck faster than about eight miles per hour in a ten mile stretch where we couldn’t pass him… This was in West Virginia so it was to be expected, but still annoying.
Once we started up the back road that wound up the mountain to the site we ended up stuck behind a dump-truck full of asphalt that couldn’t get going faster than about eight miles per hour… Well, with the blind curves and hills we couldn’t see over, Zeze still decides to pass the truck which, with the general disuse of the road, goes off without a hitch till we approach the first flagman…
PA DOT had decided that yesterday was a good day to rip up the road we needed to use to get to the site… A road that might have seen a dozen cars a day.
So, not able to get to Sideling Hill we pressed on to Clark’s Knob…
We arrived at the top of Clark’s Knob after an hour of putting across a non-maintained forest road to discover that the concrete tower that was Clark’s Knob was simply not there… About 100 feet from the GPS coordinates for the tower there was a ten foot square concrete pad surrounded by a chain link fence, but no tower. There were lots of other communications towers on top of the knob and I figure the old AT&T site was demolished to clear the path for some cell phone system.
Ok, we figure that we’ll check the next site and if it’s a bust too, we’ll just bail and go home. No need to trek clear across PA if there’s nothing to see…
We drive down the PA turnpike for another half an hour, paying $2.60 to do so, and eventually come to the location where Hallam should be… Yes, should be. Where it sat is now a private driveway and a house. Damn human infestation… About a half mile from the tower site we saw some AT&T horns on a type-a tower, but we were so frustrated we just returned the way we came.
We headed home through Baltimore MD, right past the place where the Yacht used to sit, then stopped in Woodbridge for gas and dinner at Chili’s.
All in all the trip was a bust… We did get to see some nice scenery in PA though, specifically the view from Clark’s Knob which was worth the trip as it’s PA’s version of Lookout Mountain in Colorado.
And speaking of Colorado, one more week till my triumphant return to the Rocky Mountains! The Honda has been getting the complete “fiddle with it” from the rice doctors down at the performance shop for the last two days and I think it’ll be in the best condition it can be for the trip.
