The Poconos are a place I really wasn’t too familiar with before this trip. I had heard of them of course, I even drove through them a couple times when I moved to and from Colorado. But I never stopped to do anything there. We ended up here because we knew we wanted to do our stops in New York that we already mentioned, we knew we wanted to go through Virginia, which we’ll get to soon and we knew that we wanted to see our friends who live in Philly and also love camping. So my friend found Promised Land State Park when we realized that the rules at campgrounds at the Delaware Water Gap were just too restrictive.
As I said, this stop was mostly about seeing friends and enjoying the outdoors, a little less about exactly where it happened. As for the camping it was pretty good quality. The park was very nice, it was near lots of water which the dog loved, it was pretty quiet, and had great tree cover which kind of turned into a curse in the form of tree rain. (That’s going to require some explanation; you see it rained a lot of the time we were there, which I’ll get into, but the rest of the time the wind simply shook the water from the leaves of all the trees which is indistinguishable from actual rain in terms of the noise it makes when you’re sitting in a tent under the rain fly and led to us believing it was raining much more often than it actually was.)
While we were there, a lot of our time revolved around cooking meals and playing board games. Our friends love them as much as us and turned us on to some of our favorites, like Munchkin and 7 Wonders. There was also a good bit of me and my friend trying to discuss this really nerdy fantasy series he gave me the first book of and I gave him the second book of. I say trying because Sarah and his wife shut us down pretty quickly every time, I think it was a bit more nerdy for the two of us than they could handle.
It rained a lot of the time, which put a damper on a lot of outdoor activities, but we still managed a pretty great hike and a mediocre one. The mediocre one was in the park at a place called conservation island, it was short and crowded, but did feature some decent scenery; the lake around it had some really cool mist on it following that morning’s rain. The great hike was just up the road at the Delaware State Forest (of Pennsylvania, I assume it’s named for the river or the Indian tribe, but to not include that in the name was a bit confusing for a minute). We hiked the Egypt Meadows trail. At first it seemed like a short but scenic trail ending at what would be an awesome set of primitive camping sites, a couple of fire pits in a grassy meadow right next to a lake, about a mile or so from the trail head. But while we jokingly talked about packing up and moving there for that night someone discovered that the trail continued but became much less open. He rest of the trail involved a lot of walking through brush and climbing over rocks with only trail markers providing an indication you weren’t just wandering through the woods. Ella went swimming a dozen times throughout the hike. Pretty much every time we lost sight of her she returned dripping wet right next to our friend’s dog, one of the few other pets she actually seems to enjoy hanging out with.
This trip is starting to involve a lot of new experiences and I’m learning quite a few things, so I’m going to start summing some of them up at the end of these posts.
Things I learned:
4 people and 2 dogs can fit in our tent and play board games. We discovered this during one of main rainy periods and it made me really appreciate that we had gone for larger than a 2 person tent.
I no longer know the difference between newts and salamanders, we saw a tons of one or the other after the Egypt Meadows hike, but I couldn’t tell you which.
There is a very extensive system of country roads west of Scranton that will take you anywhere but back to the Interstate and have zero cell reception. I learned this when Google maps directed us onto one for what was meant to be a short bit, then lost the GPS signal, then restarted, losing the loaded maps.
Bicoastal Surf 