NY Camping Trip Recap, Day 5
Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in recaps; we had another trip to visit my parents this last week... maybe more about that soon!
{Part four here}
When we left off in part four I was sleeping somewhat fitfully, but I did manage to get some solid multi-hour chunks of sleep that night, so it was a definite improvement over our first night in Letchworth. It was after 7:30 when we all woke up, so that was also an improvement!
It was close to 9 when we finished breakfast. We began breaking camp after that... checkout time was 10 AM, but others in campsites around us seemed to be taking their time, and so we did too.
It was after 11 by the time we had everything packed up and ready to go. We took one last trip to the bathroom and the dumpster to get rid of our trash, and then we were on our way! The park employees didn't seem to mind about the late checkout, thankfully.
We drove around the north end of the park to the dam overlook and had our lunch there.
More egg sandwiches and leftover salmon pasta salad from the cooler!
We took a peek into the gift shop here for souvenirs, but they had limited inventory and only one employee selling things from the door without letting people actually come inside (all due to the pandemic). The girls had hoped to get some postcards but alas, there were none. They were selling ice cream, but we all agreed that we would wait until later in the afternoon and have our treat on the way to the next park, so we could stop somewhere that would have an allergy-friendly option for C.
So we said goodbye to Letchworth and got on the road. We had to use our paper map to navigate out of the park since cell signal was still not happening. Once we were out of the park we were able to use our phones again and plug directions into Google Maps, along with a stop for iced coffee for Mom and Dad, a donut for C, and McFlurries for the rest of the family. The girls enjoyed their treats while I made a quick dash into a nearby grocery store to pick up a few more items to round out our meals for the rest of the trip.
The drive between the two parks was more upstate New York beauty-- remote farms, and the beginnings of the rolling hills surrounding the Finger Lakes region. We listened to a lot of Weird Al to pass the time!
M had done some quick internet research as we drove and navigated us to the Watkins Glen entrance closest to a quick trail that we could walk. Again, our arrival time was slightly before check-in time at the campground, so we would have a couple of hours to kill.
As we pulled into the South Entrance, the first thing the girls noticed was the pool... we happened to arrive on the very first day that they had re-opened the pool for the summer! Of course all girls wanted to go swimming right away, but Mom and Dad decided we would take our walk first and then decide whether the pool looked too crowded for pandemic safety.
And so we set out from the parking lot towards the Lily Pond, then took the suspension bridge over the gorge to the Spiral Tunnel and Cavern Cascade. As soon as we were inside the gorge we were all blown away at every turn by the amazing scenery. It was even more spectacular than I remembered!
It was quite hot that afternoon, and the end of our walk involved a sharp uphill climb out of the gorge, so by the time we finished the girls were begging even more for a swim. M and I checked out the pool and it wasn't very crowded, so we decided that rewarding the girls for their hard work on the walk would be just the ticket.
And it definitely was!!
We hung out in the kiddie pool, because we had it totally to ourselves. The bigger three girls went to jump into the deeper pool a few times (keeping their distance from others), but M and I were content to refresh ourselves in the shallow water and watch J paddle around like a little fish. We felt pretty lucky to have our first swim since February in such a peaceful place, and without a big crowd! It was already check-in time so we took about 30 minutes to cool off and refresh, and then got showered and changed and headed off to start setting up camp.
We checked in at our campsite and our usual team of helpers began pitching the tents. M lit a fire for me right away because the dinner plan was quesadillas cooked directly on the fire in foil packets, so we needed the coals to burn down a bit before we could start cooking.
I helped to pitch the sleeping tent and then as M, N, and L worked on getting the "stuff" tent pitched and the beds blown up, I started assembling the quesadillas and getting them wrapped in foil and on the fire grate. N and J cut up some fruit for me, and the quesadillas cooked so quickly that we were ready to have dinner in about 10 minutes. We thoroughly enjoyed our meal after an active day-- there's nothing like the flavor of a quesadilla cooked over an open fire.
Immediately after dinner we had our s'mores, since the fire was already going. We sort of did the dishes simultaneously since it was getting late. After we were thoroughly stuffed and everything was cleaned up, we began our trips to the bathroom for teeth brushing and final bathroom call. The bathroom at our Watkins Glen campsite was about the same distance away as it had been at Letchworth, so not a super long walk, but not right nextdoor either. After our late-ish afternoon swim and the work of getting everything set up followed by dinner, it was fully dark by the time we were getting ready for bed. It took us a good 30-45 minutes to get everyone washed up, brushed, pottied and ready for pjs. The girls were in the tent for bed after 9:30 PM.
I enjoyed the last of the fire while M made his last trip to the bathroom.
Things were pretty quiet around our campsite, but after the trauma of the raccoons at the previous park, I didn't sit for long before putting out the fire, changing into my pjs, and joining the girls. M wasn't long after me.
As was always the case on this trip, it took me a while to settle, just listening to all the outside noises. The camping loop was pretty packed with people that night, and our surrounding campers weren't loud, but I was hyper-aware of all their small noises and really I was just keeping my ears open for animals. Eventually I did drift off, but for only a few hours, because around 1 AM I heard L telling the other girls that she was nearly on the ground because her air mattress was deflated. It was hard to work out a solution to that one in my sleep-deprived stupor, but I knew I didn't want to run the (loud) air pump and risk waking up the two people in the tent who were still sleeping. In the end I opted to switch places with C. C slept the rest of the night in my spot on the fully inflated air bed next to M, and I moved to the partially deflated one so that, being much heavier than C, my weight bolstered L so that she wasn't on the ground anymore. Despite the fact that I was now pretty much on the ground myself, I remember that it didn't take me long to fall back into a very sound sleep after that. Success!
To be continued...
{move on to part 6 here!}
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