Airstream von Soich

After another night on a mattress that seems much more uncomfortable this year than it did last, we woke up, had breakfast, and got a kind-of late start to go to visit Brookville, PA, and some features of Cook State Forest.

For those who don’t know, I’m told that I spent a couple of years of my life there, when I was 1-2 years old. As I was researching what there was to do around this park, I saw that Brookville was not too far from here, and it was coincidentally on the way to the forest, so we decided to try and find my old house, based on the sketchy information my sister gave me. (To her credit, she was only 9, and it was 39 years ago. Oh, whoops, did I just give out her age?)

I called her on the cell phone (since we were not in the campground’s “dead zone”) as we took the exit toward the town, to get any final clues. “Wood street,” she said, “I’m pretty sure it was Wood street.” Pause. “or maybe Oak. But no, I’m almost positive I’m remembering Wood street.”

So, I drove through the town, describing features of Main street to her, and she was telling me that it wasn’t off of Main, that I had to go up on the hill to the “left” of town.

I stopped at a convenience store after I got out of downtown (at which point I’m sure we’ve gone too far) and asked the clerk if she knew where Wood Street was. She didn’t know, and neither did the next customer in line, when she asked him. She directed me to a map of Brookville that they have posted in the back of the store.

Sure enough, there was NO Wood street, but there WAS an Oak street, and it was up on the hill to the “left of town” and it didn’t connect directly to Main, so I set the GPS to “go here”, and turned around.

Some twisty minutes later, we’re on Oak, and I’m on the phone again. “It had a garage on the left,” she said, “and it had a second story balcony.” Talking to a resident who happened to be out doing lawnwork, we verified that a neighbor my sister recalled did indeed live on this street.

A few more houses, and we saw this:

As far as I can tell, this is it.

With that matter resolved, we stopped for a quick lunch at a BBQ hut that some other campers recommended, then headed up toward Cook Forest.

An interesting thing about Cook Forest is that it’s an old growth forest, meaning that it’s never been clear cut for timber. Because of this, there are almost no ground plants under the trees. (Kudos to Kaley who was the first to answer this correctly. Yes, we quiz our kids on vacation. Doesn’t everyone?)

We took the dirt road to the fire tower and lookout point, which were both picturesque:

Tomorrow is Camden’s birthday, and he’s insisting we go back to Applebee’s, since yesterday, the waiters sang to Alec and gave him ice cream.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 13th, 2009 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.