Day in the Life of an Idiot

I had been most looking forward to today. We had Mason with us and the on stop I was SURE we would all deeply enjoy was Centralia, Pennsylvania. If you know this town at all, it's probably through the video game "Silent Hill," which took the idea of what happened in real life Centralia and expanded it. So what happened in real life? A garbage fire ended up igniting a coal vein... the ground underneath the town has been burning ever since. It will apparently burn for many, many more years yet before the coal is depleted.

There wasn't much to take pictures of, thought I did snag one of the Orthodox Church that stands watch over the remains of the town.


The Centralia Orthodox Church.

But, there really is almost nothing to see. A couple of years ago, someone covered "graffiti road" with dirt, probably to discourage tourists like me and my family: https://allthatsinteresting.com/centralia-pa

Plus, my family and I probably should have eaten before we tried to find Centralia. We get notoriously bitchy if we don't eat by a time, and we missed an opportunity to grab a sandwich and so by the sixth time that I was turning around on a tiny, narrow highway there may have been some yelling... which was not at all how I wanted this particular leg of the trip to be. I had really hoped we'd get out of the car and wander around, but we ended up turning around so many times that by the time we ran into some other people on one of the side road who were also exploring the ex-town, we were all so fried that we never even got out to stretch our legs.

:-(

But, we made up for it by finding a spectacular waterfall outside of Clarion, PA, called Rapp Run Falls. 


Image: The falls


Image: Rapp Run River, looking like something out of Middle Earth

The other thing that amused us today were the Pennsylvania mile markers. Apparently, they mark every tenth of a mile and they have never heard of reducing factions, so there were 1/10, 2/10 (instead of 1/5), 3/10, 4/10 (instead of 2/5ths) and the one that drove me insane, 5/10th... I mean, okay, for consistency I get maybe doing everything else as tenths, but why not mark the half mile as HALF MILE?? 

Can you tell we were pretty bored of driving?



It was a long day, but we are safely back in Youngstown, OH again. Having liked out hotel so much the first time around, we simply booked it again for the return trip.