Our RV Adventures

Today was mostly a clean up day. When we left our gate in Texas we pretty much just threw a lot of stuff in some bins and hit the road. So now it was time to start going through the bins, keeping some stuff, and throwing the rest away.

We ended up with about 5 garbage bags to be thrown away. And we’ve still got more stuff to go through tomorrow.

About 5 pm we all headed over to Funck’s Family Restaurant over in Palmyra to have dinner. We found this place online, and it had all unanimously good reviews.

And the reviews were right.

This place was really, really good. Terry, Jan, and I started out with their Baked Tomato Soup Crock, tomato soup with croutons, topped with swiss, provolone, and parmesan cheeses, and then baked in a crock.

This was so good that I said when we come back (and we WILL come back) I’m having the Baked Tomato Soup as an appetizer and then another bowl as my meal. it’s that good.

Before we left for dinner, Nick had tantalized us with rumors of Miss Terry’s world-famous cinnamon rolls. And the rumors turned out to be true.

About 8pm we walked across the road to Nick and Terry’s to have some of this delicious treat. And we even got some to take home. Wow, these are good.

And we’ll have some for breakfast tomorrow.

Nice!

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Thought for the Day:

"See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time." – Robin Williams.

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To follow up on my recent train theme, here’s a repost of my 2009 visit to the Railroad Museum in Strasburg, where we visited yesterday.

More trains . . .

Originally posted on July 14, 2009

The indoor part of the Railroad Museum resembles a large railroad station, with multiple tracks full of trains.

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This is the John Bull. It’s a replica of the first locomotive to run on a railroad in America.

In 1831 the first railroad was built between Philadelphia and New York and the John Bull was the engine. It’s hard to think now of how this revolutionized travel in the US.

It cut the travel time from Philadelphia to New York from 2 days by coach to 5 HOURS!. It’s hard to do that by car now.

I saw this same locomotive last week in the Smithsonian, but wasn’t able to get close enough to read the display due to the crowds. I was surprised to learn here that the one I had seen in the Smithsonian was the REAL John Bull, from 1831.

It ran a regular route until 1866, then traveled around the US on exhibitions until it was donated to the Smithsonian in 1884.

This beautiful example of a 2-6-0 Mogul locomotive carried silver ore on the Virginian & Truckee railroad in Nevada from 1875 to 1944.

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The ’2-6-0′ type of nomenclature describes the layout of a locomotive’s wheels, and only applies to steam type locomotives.

The Mogul above has 2 small wheels up front, 6 drive wheels in the middle, and no small wheels in the rear. Thus, it is a 2-6-0.

This locomotive #7002, dates from 1902 and was the first one in regular service to exceed 100 mph.

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Note that this one is a 4-4-2, although you can just barely see the 2 wheels under the tender at the far right of the photo.

Arguably the largest locomotive ever built was the ‘Big Boy’ built for the Union Pacific to pull large coal trains up and down the Rockies out West.

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Note that this one is a 4-8-8-4. That’s a lot of wheels.

Below is a type of locomotive I’d never heard of.

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This one is unusual in that it doesn’t have a boiler or generate its own steam. It’s basically just a big thermos bottle. It’s filled up with live steam from a stationary boiler and then operated, usually in the rail yard, until it needed to be refilled.

Outside was even better.

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It was a rail yard full of more trains. And it has a real operating roundtable, used to move locomotives in and out of the yard.

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Even more locomotives…

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And a rail crane used to lift derailed engines and cars back on the track.

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I’ve always been fascinated by the big steam engines and this was a great chance to see them up close.

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Today started off slowly but turned out to be pretty busy.

Our first thing was give Stu & Donna McNicol a send off. They’re heading over to Maryland to visit relatives for awhile.

Later, around 12:30, Jan and I headed over to the Strasburg area just southeast of Lancaster to check out the area where we spent some time during the summer of 2009 while we were on our way out to Newfoundland.

We stayed at a Passport America in the area called Roamer’s Retreat, and it looks like it’s just as nice as it was three years ago.

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And the view from the park of the surrounding countryside looked just as good as before too.

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By now we were getting hungry so we headed over to a place we had eaten at three years ago and really liked. We didn’t remember the name, just where it was located. It turned out to be a Isaac’s Deli, a local chain.

And the food is just as good as we remembered. One item was a type of tomato soup. It turned out to be their Pepperjack Tomato. Closer to a bisque than a soup, it was delicious.

As were the sandwiches we had. Jan had the Shrike, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, melted provolone cheese, fresh tomatoes and sprouts. I had the similar Canary Club, with cranberry-almond chicken salad, provolone cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo.

And our sandwiches were so big we both had leftovers. Nice.

Then for dessert, we split a slice of their Pumpkin Cranberry Stack, a spiced pumpkin cake kind of like a carrot cake. Really delicious, too.

After lunch Jan and I walked to the other end of the small group of stores to visit the Choo Choo Barn, a family-owned, 1700 sq. ft. O Gauge model railroad layout.

And this was a really neat layout. not only very detailed, but the lighting, and especially the animation, were just amazing.

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This is a zoo with many of the animals moving and making noises.

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A Flea Market

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This one is really amazing. It’s an Amish barn raising. And what this picture doesn’t show is all of the animated Amish guys on the roof hammering away, and guys on the ground sawing lumber. Really neat.

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And like the Entertrainment Junction we visited in Cincinnati a couple of weeks ago, this layout also has a night period to show off the many lighting effects.

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This animation has a guy flying a control line model airplane around the yard. The plane is the yellow shape in the middle of the picture.

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In the snow-covered mountain scene in the background here, the gondola goes up and down the mountain, and skiers ride the lift up and then ski back down.

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I think you’d have to go through this several times to even start to see all the neat things going on.

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Leaving the Choo Choo Barn, and heading home, we drove through the Red Caboose Motel, a motel made up of 41 cabooses, ah . . .  caboosi, maybe. Anyway, there’s a bunch of them.

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And they even have a Pullman Dining Car to use as their motel restaurant.

A really neat place, and I bet, fun to stay at.

We finally got home just in time to turn around and head back out with Nick and Terry for supper. We ended up at the Cocoa Diner in Hershey, a place Nick and Terry had eaten before, and it was really good with a very big menu.

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Thought for the Day:

"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him." – Galileo Galilei

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