Pictureless in Pennsylvania…

We drove to the Catskills on a beautiful sunny day.

Something we rarely see in BC are hillsides clad exclusively in deciduous trees. With no evergreens to interrupt the overall texture, the hillsides in the Catskills looked like a bunch of different pastel coloured pillows that had been loosely bunched together. You’ll have to believe me because I never took a picture, thinking that I would catch the hills more favorably imbued with a morning or evening light. It never happened.

Stopping for lunch at the town of Catskill, we then drove to another small town further into Catskill Park called Phoenicia. We were the only campers at Sleepy Hollow Campground on the Esopus River, a couple of kilometers from the town. We rode our bikes into Phoenicia and when we returned we sat in the sun by the river.

Then the weather changed. Within five minutes we were driven inside where, turning on the weather channel, we found the forecast was for heavy rain and all kinds of other inclement weather warnings due to another tropical storm. For once, the forecast was accurate.

We woke in the morning to torrential rains pounding on the roof. It’s weird because even though it was raining heavily, it was still about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so it felt more like we were in Mexico or Hawaii. Because we didn’t want to sit by a campsite in the valley bottom, by the river, during the repeated warnings from the National Weather Advisory for another tornado watch, as well as flash floods, we decided to move on.

I called the campsite that we’d been told about previously, in Jersey City, right across from Manhattan. The campground was booked but the woman there told us she could put us in the overflow, with no services. We booked it for two days hence and pulled up camp, heading south, with the idea of positioning ourselves within an hour-and-a-half or so from the Jersey Campground.

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The media drives me crazy. A person just can’t believe anything the media reports anymore. The television newscasts last night were three-quarters full of dire storm warnings, detailing all the horrible things that could happen to us , if, if, if… Basically they’re making it up, hoping something will happen.

Today, after about the fiftieth storm warning reported by the radio stations, as we were driving south into the storm, I brought up the subject of how all the media in North America are now owned by a few mega corporations that use their media properties as vehicles to create fear. About how they want us to go about our day-to-day lives looking over our shoulders, concerned by the threat of terrorism, or global warming, or tornado warnings, or flash flood alerts. They have the general population's subconcious so busy being afraid that, in most cases, people don’t notice how their lives are passing them by while they work away, in most cases for less and less disposable income, only to tythe their taxes to the governments that are in the pockets of those same corporations that own the media…

Janice just changed the subject.

My rant over with, we ended up in the corner of Pennsylvania, in the Pocono’s, at Shady Acres Campground near Mt. Bethel. The rain was still coming down heavily as I wrote this but the tornado warning was due to expire in an hour or so. I’m willing to bet that if I tune into the media tomorrow, no tornadoes will have materialized.

We spent our down time doing laundry, writing the blog and adding up September’s expenses. It’s hard to believe that as of today we’ve been on the road for four months - one third through our adventure already. The good news is we were $500.00 under budget for September. The bad news is that we were $1500.00 over budget for August.

We’re only an hour or so from the Big Apple and by this time tomorrow we should be lost somewhere in the middle of Manhattan…