One thing to add about Gettysburg before moving on… In my experience people in Pennsylvania have a distinct accent depending on where they live. The Pittsburgh accent is different than the Philadelphia accent, which is different from the “Pennsylvania Dutch” accent of the central hills, and so forth. But no one I encountered in and around Gettysburg had a distinguishable accent. It could be that many of the folks come from other areas. But it was even true of the people I met working in the local hardware store, and the kids hanging out at Forry’s Drive-In restaurant. They were virtually free of accent. Maybe it was coincidental but it was also noticeable, especially after having been in Tennessee and North Carolina for a week and listened to their pronounced mountain twang.

Gifford Pinchot State Park proved to be a great spot for four days. But on Monday, May 2 it was time to move on to the next part of our journey. My intent was to do a drive-by of the Military Academy at West Point, NY and then on to my next campground. But when scouting out the trip it seemed like too much travel for one day, so I opted to stay at a Boondockers Welcome location in New Jersey. And it was barely in New Jersey, at the far northwest corner of the state. It was a mile or so from High Point State Park, so named because it is the highest point in the state of New Jersey, about 1,900 feet above sea level. As we passed the park, we were actually in the clouds and I had to slow down to make sure I stayed on the unfamiliar road. Not exactly a Himalayan adventure, but plenty of excitement for this newbie trailer-puller.

Raja’s Place (the name the owner had given the BW site) was a nice, out of the way rural setting, on a 21-acre property right by a barn and one of the only flat spots in the area. The sleep was crappy, as the slide was in again and there was no heat, but we survived and were off to West Point, about an hour’s drive east, in the morning.

West Point was a disappointing stop for us. First, as I guess I should have expected, you need to have some kind of government i.d. to even get on the place. That makes sense as they don’t need a bunch of tourists wandering around the place. I had seen beautiful pictures of the campus, and just didn’t add one and one to figure out that they weren’t taken by a cheeser like me. The guard politely answered my questions as he turned me around at the gate, and suggested I try Highway 9W north of town as there were a few nice spots along there.

And there were. However, 9W is a highway that I suspect was laid down the better part of a century ago. It climbs swiftly and corkscrews around, and the lanes are narrow and challenging. The speed limit is 55, which I would not be comfortable doing in a passenger car much less a truck pulling a trailer. The locals didn’t seem to have such reservations as they blew by me as if I was backing out of my driveway. I was a bit too white-knuckled to leave the road at any of the first few tiny pullouts that I found. I did manage to find one that was a little bigger and easier to negotiate, and took a gloomy picture of what I’m sure is a beautiful Hudson River valley.

From there, we proceeded to our campground in Connecticut. The campground is called Cozy Hills, and I am learning to be a bit circumspect regarding any campground with the word “hill” or “mountain” in the name. In my limited experience they have been more primitive and… hilly. Not an insurmountable challenge, but it’s always a bit more difficult to level the trailer and get it rehitched when you are on even a moderate slope.

Cozy Hills fits the image I have in my mind of what old, Eastern campgrounds are like. They have lots of summer activities, and it’s kind of like a roughneck’s version of the summer resort in Dirty Dancing. I can imagine it buzzing with activity during the summer months. But for now, in the middle of the while school is in session, it’s eerily quiet. There are quite a few trailers here, but by the looks of them I think their owners park them here either for the season, or even longer than that, and use them as a kind of summer cabin. They look very settled, with patio furniture and adjoining platforms and more accoutrements than a temporary camper would drag along. A trailer two over from me has enough firewood by his trailer to last me at least two winters in my fireplace back home.

The little town of Bantam, and its next door neighbor Litchfield, are picture-postcard cute. Many towns that size are dead or dying, but these two have shops and interesting buildings and eateries despite their very small size. I wonder how many of the residents make their livings locally, as opposed to making the 45-minute commute to Hartford to work. A further six miles up the road is the small city of Torrington, of about 35,000 residents, a city with an industrial history that is trying to reinvent itself. I would like to investigate it further if I had time.

Today I am going to leave Ollie for a few hours and venture into Hartford to see the last home of Mark Twain. One of my intermittent touristy stops. It’s a rainy day, and the four-day stretch of overcast is supposed to break tomorrow, with sunshine in the forecast, so I figured this would be the better day to have Ollie cooped up.