One of Those Exhausting Days

Monday, May 2, 2022

Today was one of those exhausting days which just seems like slogging through mud and getting nowhere. We slept just fine, but woke up without much "ooomph", still very physically drained from all of our efforts the night before. It was about 9:00 before Joe was ready to call tire places. Our plan was to find a new tire and get it installed before leaving the Lancaster area. However, the tire places were all pretty busy, and although we found several with the tire in stock, no one could take us before the afternoon. In the end, we decided to just buy the new tire and keep it as a spare, and continue driving on the spare we'd put on the night before. The only down side to this is, we did not re-attach the tire pressure monitors to those two tires, and we will miss having them to warn us if another tire springs a leak.

It was about 1:00 by the time we got our new tire (the old one was not worth keeping, it was too old to begin with) and we stopped not long afterwards at at Lancaster visitor center to have some lunch. So it was after 1:30 by the time we left Lancaster. Oh, and we'd acquired one more problem: the pulley which stores the spare tire decided that although it worked fine last night, it was now stuck and would not come down. So we put our new spare tire in the back of the Jeep until we get home, or until Joe decides how to fix it while we are traveling. Yet one more thing to deal with.

I don't know why we had so much trouble deciding which route to take, frankly. We were planning to go on I-76 (the PA Turnpike) and we did that, but when the tunnels appeared, Joe was worried that we shouldn't go through them with our propane (one of the "danger" warnings on the signs). So we took an exit instead, and continued on a circuitous route on several other roads, 3 other interstates, going south of the border into Maryland before coming back up into southern Pennsylvania. Every time I looked to see "how much longer", it seemed like more time than when I'd looked before. And it was all so slow--The roads were quite steep through the mountains, with very long grades, and I drove up most of them in second gear. 

 We stopped a couple of times for gas. The second time was at a Pilot station which had an Arby's attached, and as it was already almost 7pm, we decided to have Arby's for dinner. After that, we had our last 90 minutes to go (the road never seemed to get shorter, and the time seemed to constantly get longer) before finally getting to Ohiopyle State Park, where we had a reservation for tonight. It was not QUITE dark by the time we got here, but we were so tired, we just drove head first into what is normally a back-in site. Luckily, it was long enough to keep the Jeep attached while we were here. I lay down on the bed immediately and simply passed out for a couple of hours, I was that exhausted. I think Joe must have slept, also. When I woke up at around 11pm, I needed to eat something, and then had trouble falling asleep.

One of the reasons I felt so tired was I seem to have developed a cold, or else an allergy situation (everything is blooming, of course.) It was already bothering me a little bit yesterday, too. And I was also worried that maybe it was Covid, evven though I am fully vaccinated. I decided that my plan for tomorrow was ridiculous-- I didn't want to go to tour Fallingwater at 12:30, then drive another hour-90 minutes to spend the night at Walmart, and get up tomorrow to run into Pittsburgh to the museum and then hit the road AGAIN for another 3 hours. It all just seemed too much.

So I decide on a plan. I would first take a covid test if I still felt lousy. If the test was negative, I would book another night in this campground. That way, we could hang out in the morning, go to Fallingwater in the afternoon, then relax when we got back here and have a quiet evening. If the test was positive, obviously we'd just turn around and come home. After I'd made these decisions, I felt like things were a little more under control, and I finally fell back asleep.