Mom set her alarm for 7, when we booked our hotels we made sure all of them had a free continental breakfast in the mornings so we didn't have to waste time trying to find breakfast. The first hotel wasn't the nicest but it did for the purpose we used it for. I was not a fan of the carpet so I wore socks or shoes when I walked around. We got ready and headed downstairs for some food. Mom and I made waffles and watched the news as we ate. We were the only ones in the dining room eating. We went back up to our room and packed up our stuff and took it down to the rental. We made one more sweep to make sure we didn't leave anything behind. Mom checked us out of the hotel as I put coordinates in to our next destination. It wasn't as nice as it was yesterday. I looked at the weather forecast for middle and eastern Pennsylvania and it was going to be drizzly all day long. Once we got on the road mom wanted to go to a Walmart so we took a detour to Walmart.
We got out and mom wanted to find a plastic file holder with a zipper so we could keep our receipts and parking money/turn pike money secure and organized. I told her that was a pretty good idea so we went to look for one and found one that would do. Meanwhile, we grabbed some more drinks, some snacks and I looked at some of the Penguin memorabilia. I found a $3 Penguin child's backpack and yes, I brought it home with me. I found a trifold poster board for my sign for the game on Saturday and got a couple of Sharpies. We paid for our stuff and followed Nuvi to the Lincoln Highway.
We followed the highway to our intended stop, the United 93 Memorial. Along the way we made a few stops. Mom saw a mural that she wanted to get a picture of so we turned around, parked and she got out and got her photo. It was a pretty cool mural and I am glad we stopped. We kept on down the road, heading east.
Then mom saw the signs for a covered bridge. She is a sucker for stopping and checking those out. I mean why not? We have time and not much planned other than the memorial and driving up to Cooperstown, N.Y. Mom did mention something about driving to Hershey and checking out the museum there but that was later on today. Since we were not coming back this way we stopped and saw the covered bridges. The first one was off the Lincoln Highway near Stoystown. We followed the sign off of the highway and made our way to a small park with a covered bridge on the property. It was called the Trostletown Bridge and it was built in 1845.
Mom took several pictures of it and I checked my geocaching app to see if there was a geocache here. There was! Of course there was. This property doubled as an American Legion Post and there was a tank here. The cache was hidden on the tank somewhere. It was a regular sized cache how hard could it be to find it? It took me a while to find Caterpillar Tracks (GC1QP2D). The cache blended in so well underneath the tank. I had walked past it twice before I was like, duh here it is. I signed our names and put it back.
We got back in the rental car and got back on the highway towards the memorial. Just before we got to the memorial, mom saw another sign for another covered bridge. We turned off the highway and headed towards the small town of Shanksville. The first time I've ever heard of Shanksville was when I was a senior in high school on September 11, 2001. I had gotten up early that day (way earlier than I usually get up) to Erika and Dad arguing about turning the movie off and getting ready for school. Erika said, "Dad...this isn't a movie, this is actually happening." I had walked out of my room as the Pentagon was getting hit with American Airlines Flight 77, the third airplane that was hijacked. I stood there in awe, what the hell is happening?! Erika explained that both of the Twin Towers in Manhattan have been hit by planes and now are both on fire and smoking. Since we lived on the west coast everything we were seeing was happening as we were all getting up around 6-7 a.m. It was already 9-10 a.m. on the east coast. About a half hour later, 7 a.m. our time, is when the 4th hijacked plane, United 93 crashed into a field just outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Where the heck is Shanksville? The rest of that day was spent glued to the television watching all of the events unfold. We were literally watching history.
As we got closer to the small town of Shanksville, we saw the sign to go see the covered bridge. It was outside of town down a dirt county road. My phone didn't work out here so I couldn't check for a geocache. I'm sure there was one here though.
We parked the rental car and mom took her photos. Glessner Bridge was built in 1881 and spans over the Stonycreek River. I decided since we were almost in Shanksville we should at least drive into the town and see it. There were a lot of signs and banners that honored 9/11 and the heroes of United 93.
I wanted to find a cache in this town because of its historical significance so I checked my cache app and saw one a few streets from us. O&G at the Happy Little Town (GC7VDN6) was near a town building underneath some stairs. I found it quickly and took a button that said Shanksville Proud. I left a pathtag for the next set of finders.
We got back in the rental and headed back towards the highway. We were now heading to the memorial...finally. More than a decade ago, I found out that they had built a memorial for this site and I told myself that if I ever find myself in Pennsylvania I needed to come here. After 18 years, 1 month and 26 days since the crash we were here.
I could not believe we were actually at the Flight 93 Memorial. This is where United 93 crashed into the ground. We followed the road to a parking lot. We really weren't sure where to go exactly but we saw this small building in the lower part of the park so this is where we went first. We grabbed our jackets because it was lightly raining and walked into the building.
A volunteer park ranger, named Bob, welcomed us to the memorial. He asked us where we were from and we told him Washington State, he said he's been there and it's a beautiful state. He asked us what we knew about Flight 93 and September 11, 2001. I started out by telling him that I was a senior in high school when it happened and since then I've read a lot about it. I had just finished a book called Flight 93: The Story, The Aftermath and the Legacy of American Courage on 9/11 because I knew we were coming here and I wanted to know as much as I could about it. A few years ago I had read Todd Beamer's wife's book Let's Roll. It talked about what kind of a person Todd was and how she wasn't surprised that he and a bunch of other passengers weren't going down without a fight. This stuff was fascinating to me. As I filled out a visitor's card and signed our names in the book, he started to tell us about the area. Most of the stuff he told us I knew but it was his job and just let him talk. When he was done and since we were the only ones in the building he told us about himself and the job. He said on September 11, 2001 he was working as a prison guard and he told us how crazy that day went for him. Mom briefly told us what she was doing and I added that we had just gotten up and found out on the television. He said glad you could make it out here and to enjoy your visit.
We stepped outside and along the Memorial Plaza walkway, people had left flags, coins and flowers. Since the crash, people have left a lot of stuff behind including quilts, artwork, stuffed animals, service medals and other items behind. They keep most of that stuff in the archives and cycle it through the displays.
We took many pictures. As I walked down the walkway you felt a desperate or despair-like sadness here. I almost could compare it to Pearl Harbor when I visited back in 1998 but it was a different type of sadness which was more of an eerie or haunting type sadness. You could feel the dead people at Pearl Harbor and I couldn't feel the dead people here at Flight 93 and I wasn't sure why.
I continued looking around and stopped at the Wall of Names and chronological order of events. We were within a football field away from the Impact Site and the Boulder.
In the recent book I read about United 93, it talked about the people who were in charge of gathering the remains of the people who perished here found very little of them. The plane wreck pretty much vaporized everything. They did manage to find a trace of everyone through DNA from family members. All of those remains were put into three coffins and they are buried underneath the boulder we saw in the field. It was a very sombering experience. It's just so hard to explain to people unless you've visited these tragic places.
I asked mom if she wanted to go to the visitor's center on top of the hill and she said sure. I took a few more seconds of silence for those people who were on that plane. I can't even imagine being trapped on a plane knowing that it might not end well. That was the most incomprehensible part even back in 2001. We walked back to the rental and drove up to the visitor's center. We got out and came across another volunteer park ranger talking about the events of that day on this diagram outside. We stood out there for a while and listened.
We walked into the visitor's center and absorbed everything on the displays. In the back of my mind I was thinking, I am actually at the United 93 crash site. I just couldn't believe I was here. Just being here made it real...not that it wasn't real, being there made it real for me. It wasn't just a photograph or a newscast. We experienced the flight path with the simulator, looked at several photos, the debris from the field, debris from the twin towers, some of the items that were taken to United 93's crash site before this memorial was built were on display and other odds and ends from that horrific day we saw as we walked through.
I walked back outside and to experience the Flight Path Walkway and Overlook. As you stood there, you were in the direct path of the flight that was in line with the Wall of Names, the gate and the boulder in the field. On the glass it read, A common field one day. A field of honor forever. I stood there reflecting.
I reflected on that day and how indirectly it changed my life since I lived on the west coast and nothing really happened to us but it did transform the way we viewed our security, other people, traveling and the government. This was our new normal for the 21st century. Mom met me out there before all the field trip kids came out. We got here almost early enough before all the busses and kids got here. We finished off our visit here by going into the gift shop just to see what they had. I bought a couple of postcards and a magnet. Mom got a few things because we were okay with buying stuff here because it went directly to keeping this place going since admission to this National Park is free.
We used the restroom and then walked back to rental. There, we ate lunch in the car before we left the parking lot. I had bought a salad and mom ate her applesauce and peanut butter and other random things from her backpack. Before we left the park we stopped by the Tower of Voices. At this point it wasn't finished but we admired it anyway. It was a tribute representing the voices of the passengers and crew members.
We got back onto the highway and drove towards Bedford where it connected back with I-76. We stopped and got gas here. This was going to be part of the day where we will be doing a lot of driving. From where we were to Hershey it was going to be about a 120 mile drive which was roughly a two hour drive. It rained the entire time we were driving the interstate. We saw a lot of signs for some towns and cities we've heard of before like the town of Shippensburg. As we got closer to Harrisburg, the state capitol of Pennsylvania, the traffic got heavier. We crossed over the Susquehanna River and into Harrisburg. The rain made the traffic worse.
We made it through Harrisburg and made our way east towards Hershey. We got off the turnpike and got onto the 322 that took us right to Hershey on Chocolate Avenue. We arrived just after 3. We loved the banners on the light poles that sprinkled the main highway.
We saw the museum but missed the turn so we had to turn around. We parked and went inside. On the way in, we noticed the factory to the left of us. It was massive.
We went to the front desk and found out that we barely missed the time for the make your own chocolate bar class. We were disappointed however, this time was on the fly. We didn't plan on coming here...we just did because we could. We paid our admission and the lady told us where to start and were to end the tour. We were given tokens for the tour. You put them into the displays and they were customized for us. We learned a lot about how the company started, the progression of the company and what kind of a man Milton Hershey was. It was fun traveling through time learning about a chocolate bar that just about everyone world wide had eaten at some point. I also found out he shared a birthdate with my grandmother and he and his wife missed being on the Titanic when it sank. He put the down payment on tickets but never got on. He also started out making caramels but he ended up in the chocolate business instead.
We got to the end of the museum tour and placed our tokens into one of the three philanthropist endevours he was known for education, community service and culture. Mom and I chose education.
We ended our tour downstairs with the Mr. Hershey's Cuba: A Sweet Venture in Sugar. Hershey was a busy man and he built a long lasting legacy for generations to come. Before we left, we hit up the gift shop. I couldn't leave without buying an actual Hershey bar from Hershey. I also got a $5 pint glass because they were on clearance and you could never have too many pint glasses right?
It was starting to get dark but we grabbed the nearby cache, Ole Factory Bridge (GC6JV34) it was tucked into a wall under a bridge near the factory. Pretty cool hide. We walked back to the rental and made one more stop before heading out of town. We drove to the north part of town to get a picture of the billboard mostly because mom wanted to. We left Hershey around 4:30.
We set the Nuvi to our next location, which was Scranton, the Electric City. Since we were heading up to New York we and were on the interstate, we had to go to Scranton. I am a huge fan of The Office and I had to come here. I know it's not actually filmed here but this is where the show takes place. Nuvi took us to I-81 where we drove up through Wilkes Barre, this took about two hours and we covered about 120 miles. Thankfully this section of road wasn't part of the turnpike.
I had mom look on the phone to try and find some dinner because we were quickly approaching Scranton. I told her to find something that serves different things like burgers, chicken, pasta etc. Meanwhile, we came across a section of the freeway that was a no pay toll. We weren't sure what that meant so we drove through it hoping that the device on our rental car would just register it and we would pay it later when we got our final paperwork. We found a restaurant named Ale Mary's and we had to turn around because we got too far into the north end of town. We got off the turnpike and went south down the Scranton Expressway (Hwy 11) and made our way into the downtown part of Scranton. We followed Nuvi's directions and saw the restaurant. All we needed to do was find a parking spot.
We found one at the end of the street and found out since it was past 6 p.m. we didn't need to feed the meter. We grabbed what we needed, locked the rental and walked the short distance to the restaurant. That was a freezing cold walk. The temperature outside was probably around 20 degrees. I am so glad I picked up this winter coat a few weeks ago. It made the difference between being warm and having a good time and being cold and not having a good time. I noticed we were a block away from the Steamtown Mall and the Lackawanna River.
We walked in and were seated right away. We did have to wait a bit to order since this place was busy. Mom and I both ordered burgers and fries...mostly to keep it simple.
We ate our food, paid and got back in the rental car. I wanted a cache in Scranton so we found the closest one, Blinded By the Light (GC8809X) which was a black pill bottle under a lamp skirt. We plugged our hotel address into the Nuvi and away we went.
We got back onto the Scranton Expressway (Hwy 11) and merged back onto I-81. It was going to take us roughly 2ish hours to get from where we were to our hotel just slightly south of Cooperstown, N.Y. We had a long drive a head of us and it was slightly snowing. That didn't bother me because it was dry snow and it wasn't going to accumulate very fast.
About an hour into our drive, we crossed the Pennsylvania/NY state line. We saw the Welcome to New York sign and then the welcome center. We had been talking to dad and Ben around this time to give them an update on our trip thus far. Ben told me about his Washington State Patrol interview and assessment skill test that he took for a dispatch job. He felt like he did okay but would hear about it in a few days to see if he was chosen to go further. He was really trying to get a state job. I told him I would call him when we got to the hotel. We needed gas soon. We merged onto I-88 and stopped in Port Crane, where we found gas station and used the restroom. Mom wanted some water so I bought her some water. This was around 9:30 p.m. and we still had an hour of driving.
We continued on I-88 until we reached the town of Oneonta where we got off the interstate and headed north on route 28. We booked our hotel in the town of Milford, which was less than 10 miles from Cooperstown because the hotel's there were cheaper than Cooperstown. We didn't mind driving the 15 minutes. We arrived at the hotel around 10:30 and mom checked us in. It started snowing harder when we parked the rental car.
We rolled our luggage in and got on the elevator to room 210. There, I took a shower and got ready for bed. We watched the end of the Thursday Night Football game Raiders and Chargers. The one thing I know I don't like about the east coast is that the sports start way too late here and you have to stay up late to finish watching them. I did some internetting and we eventually went to bed about midnight. Today was a very long day but we did get to see a lot and we basically drove across the state of Pennsylvania.
Mom and I grabbed 4 caches, all traditionals in three new counties.
Mom and I grabbed 4 caches, all traditionals in three new counties.
Next Adventure: Cooperstown and Ithaca, New York
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