Day 21:

After waking up in a freezing car, I was craving a good, hot meal. Lucky for me there was a nice diner just down the street called Gramma’s Kitchen. You know when a restaurant has the word Gramma in it that it’s gonna be good food, and it most certainly was. I opted for eggs and chocolate chip pancakes, because who doesn’t love some good pancakes? After feeling re-fueled, I started towards Watkins Glen State Park in New York. It was about an hour away, so it wasn’t too far of a drive. When I arrived, however, the trail was closed due to the weather…Yeah, so I was pretty bummed, especially since their website didn’t say anything about it. That’s alright though, so I decided to head on to Ricketts Glen State Park in Pennsylvania. This time, I made sure to check their website and call ahead of time to make sure that the trail was, in fact, open. Yeah, that didn’t do me any good, apparently, because when I got there it was closed too…Honestly, I was pretty irritated at this point.

Everything was shutting down for the season due to the cold weather coming in early. This further confirmed my decision to cut the trip a bit short. I new that if I kept going north that this would be a trend that I would continue to see. I had wasted hours driving even though I thought I was being thorough. I contacted the woman in New Hampshire that I was supposed to do a Workaway with later that week, and she told me what I had already thought but even worse. She told me that if I continued on without snow tires there was a good chance I would get stuck there until Spring. Yes, Spring, so all signs were pointing to a return trip. Yes, I know, this is probably one of those trips I should have started a bit earlier in the season, but I wasn’t able to, and this weather was a bit early, too. I was planning to already be through New England before this sort of weather set in for the season, but it decided it wanted to come in already.

I am a big believer that things happen the way that they’re supposed to, so I feel that this is how this was supposed to go. By the end up this I will still have had a full month on the road, and to be quite honest, I don’t think I would want to go the two months. I was getting lonely, and I missed people back home. I don’t think that the loneliness would be much of an issue if I didn’t have people back home that I really wanted to see. Plus, I knew that in a couple of months that Joseph and I would be headed out on a trip of our own, so this wasn’t my only chance to do this.

After getting denied by two (2) different places that said they were open, I decided to go somewhere that I knew would be open. To be honest, I’m a football fan. I’m not die hard or anything, but I do enjoy a good game, and I’m an Alabama fan. It was the day of the Alabama vs. LSU game, so I decided to head to Buffalo Wild Wings for a good burger and watch the game. Yeah, we lost, so it wasn’t wildly exciting, but it did make me feel a bit better about the previous events in the day. Not far from there was a gym, so I finished getting out my frustrations with some lifting and a good long shower. What better way to cleanse the soul?