We left our home base on Saturday morning heading west on the Pennsylvania turnpike for the first leg of our trip to Lake Erie. 296 miles later we arrived at our first stop, a one night stay in Somerset PA at the Pioneer Park Campground.
Pioneer Park is a quiet campground which is really surprising since the area we were in was full of campers. Being that we were only there for one night we didn’t see all of the campground but what we saw looked nice.
The sites are gravel, level, and have small trees separating each site which makes for good privacy. The majority of the sites have full hook-ups including cable. The only downside to our site was the location of the concrete fire ring. For some reason ours was next to the road at the front of the site. If we used it, we would have been having our evening beverages while sitting in the middle of the road.
All in all, I would rate this campground a 3.5 out of 5 and come back for an extended period to check out what Somerset Pennsylvania has to offer.
The next morning, I had planned on stopping at a really good place for brunch about an hour and a half up the turnpike. Being that it was Mother’s Day I knew we would have to get on the road early in order to get a table. Unfortunately plans don’t always work out and by the time we got there, the wait was 90 to 120 minutes.
Time for Plan B, and Yelp to the rescue (since I didn’t have anything else planned when we started out). I found a listing for a place called the Freedom Square Diner, and it was only a few miles away. When we arrived, there were several people standing outside. I asked how long the wait was and the manager said they were running about 20 minutes. Works for us.
We waited more like 40 minutes for our table, which is still better than 90 or 120, but then had to wait another 40 minutes or so for the food. It was well worth the wait. Debbie had Crab Cake Eggs Benedict, and I had a steak omelet that was unbelievable. Thank you Yelp for saving us (me).
We continued on the PA turnpike, which turned into the Ohio turnpike and 249 miles later arrived at our Lake Erie destination, Crystal Rock Campground.
We’ve been here a full day now and so far it’s a great campground that is run by a husband and wife who are very friendly and go out of their way to make sure your happy. I’ll be posting more about the campground in the next couple of days.
Today we did have two events we never experienced before.
The first was with Enterprise car rental. When they advertise “we’ll pick you up” it’s not always true. We reserved a car over a month ago and when I called at 9am, I was told they were busy and “might” be able to get out to me (10 miles away) around 2:00 or 3:00. Really, five hours? I ended up taking a cab over to pick up the car and when I arrived there was only on person in the office. It was a good thing I didn’t wait for them because I got the impression that they weren’t even going to come pick us up.
The second was a major storm front that moved in and we got to experience our first tornado warning. Luckily,I have a couple of weather apps on the iPad and iPhone and double alarms were going off on both of them. We were on edge for a couple of hours, and the rain came down pretty hard, but luckily no tornados and we’re all ok. It’s a good thing I had the apps running.
Tomorrow we’re going to take the ferry over to Kelley’s Island and rent a golf cart to do a little site seeing. It should be a fun time.