"There's frost on the tent!"

We arrived in Port Jervis on Tuesday in the early afternoon with enough time to stop by and say hello to a few of Tyler’s relatives, along with eating at the famous Texas lunch where Carol works. Next went to see Kate’s volleyball game, where her team dominated. We ended the day with a relaxing evening with the Griswold clan while eating scrumptious New York style pizza.

Early on Wednesday morning we left New York for our first long drive, which made the trip really feel like it has started! The weather was very on and off, with rain here and there. The black clouds out in the distance didn’t look very hopeful. But we chugged along and finally made it to Ohio. We had some (maybe more then some..) trouble finding exactly where Cuyahoga Valley actually was. After a few wrong turns, some help from a Park Ranger and a friendly woman who works there, we FINALLY found the campground!

When we pulled up to the campsite, we knew we were in the wilderness when we saw three deer staring right at us!



We unloaded our camping stuff and set off for the campsite, which was supposed to be 1/4th a mile from where we parked...but after our first incident of bickering and two miles later…we realized that we must have passed site. So we turned around and traced our steps…only to find out that the campsite was about 10 feet away from the car. We learned our lesson- at least wait until we set up the tent to start bickering.

We set up the tent, which was a piece of cake (compared to finding the campsite), we went into the “town” of Penninsula. We had a dinner at a restaurant called Winking Lizard’s Lounge, which was actually quite good. Wouldn’t ya know it, the waitress sat us RIGHT in front of the tv which was playing the Mets game. Kinda funny that Tyler has to travel all the way to Ohio to watch a Mets game. Regardless, he was thrilled…until the Nationals hit a walk off grand slam.

After a restless night of sleep in the freezing cold, we woke up to find frost covering our tent! After thawing out to the sun, we got up and went for a short hike with our new deer friends.



Next we packed up the car and set off for our next destination- Chicago!