{"id":1729,"date":"2025-04-25T14:53:15","date_gmt":"2025-04-25T19:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/?p=1729"},"modified":"2025-04-28T06:48:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T11:48:08","slug":"road-trip-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/road-trip-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Road trip, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been watching closely, you’ll note that I’ve been a good bit out of my home range, not unlike what I did last year<\/A>. I did decide to be a bit less epic this year, and omitted Arlington National Cemetery (while I love and miss my parents, big cities are anathema to me) and Massachusetts (I saw what became of it in the 40 years after I left, I’ll check back in another 40 years \ud83d\ude09).<\/p>\n

The primary purpose of this trip, like last year’s, was to visit family in Pennsylvania. But that’s just way too long of a drive for one day (for me anyway), so I located a couple of State Parks in Virginia that happened to be almost exactly half-way there. Like before, I scheduled a break from the driving to spend a day hiking in the woods at those State Parks, this time at James River<\/A> on the way north, and at Douthat<\/A> on the way back. See those links for details of my stays there.<\/p>\n

I kept to what worked last time, early starts, easy schedules, vague ETAs (“I’ll be there late afternoon”), regular breaks (target: every 1.5 hours), and take my time. If someone else on the road is in a much bigger hurry than I am, I let them go ahead. Heck, it’s not like it’s going to do them any good to get there before I do, the campsite reservations are in my name, so they’ll have to wait for me anyway.<\/p>\n

Once again, I got to visit the World’s Largest Shop-Rite Supermarket.
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\nThe store is said to be 105,000 square feet, and you could spend a day there if you weren’t careful. The store is mostly powered by a 10-acre solar farm adjacent to the store.
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\nWhile there, we paid a visit to Beltzville State Park<\/A>, but it was a really<\/I> windy day and no one in our little group (myself excluded, of course) weren’t too interested in being out there.
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\nActually, it was pretty windy the whole time I was there, but I’m not claiming responsibility.<\/p>\n

But back to the focus of the trip. It seems some of my Sister’s neighbors are following the Sally Forth<\/A> school of Halloween decorations. If you follow that comic, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
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\nAnd closer to “home”, my Sister is a Supertastical gardener, and everywhere you look, there are spring flowers blooming.
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\nShe’s also a great cook. To earn (or at least return the favor of) my meals, I helped with some of the spring garden prep and planting. I’m looking forward to getting my share of the blueberries \ud83d\ude0f.<\/p>\n

I’m already thinking about my next trip up north next spring (PTO willing). I think I’ll return to Douthat State Park, VA<\/A> and hike the other side of it. There’s also Natural Bridge State Park, VA<\/A> that’s also in a geographically-advantageous location I might check out.<\/p>\n

The trip by the numbers:
\nStatute miles driven: 1413.0
\nFuel used: 35.309 gallons
\nElapsed trip time: 27 hours, 33 minutes
\nMost expensive gas: $3.359\/gal in Hamburg, PA
\nCheapest gas: $2.519\/gal in Laurens, SC
\nStates traversed: 6: SC NC VA WV MD PA
\nStatute miles hiked or walked: 46.4 (that I recorded)
\nUnread work Emails upon return: 4519<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve been watching closely, you’ll note that I’ve been a good bit out of my home range, not unlike what I did last year. I did decide to be a bit less epic this year, and omitted Arlington National Cemetery (while I love and miss my parents, big cities are anathema to me) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1729"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1729\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildcorvid.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}