Not Lacking in Pennsylvania: Philly Area Stop & Lackawanna State Park (Dalton, PA)

After being sprung free from US Coach for our preventative maintenance stop in Vineland, New Jersey it was time to continue our journey north.

Our next stop was a planned rendezvous in the Philadelphia area, and with the upcoming 4th of July holiday weekend – plotting a course that would keep us with awesome places to stay.

Visiting Friends in Philadelphia, PA

Barb and Gwen are folks who lived in Florida when I did. When I first met them, they lived on a sailboat and Gwen was 7 years old.

Making them likely the first real life nomadic family I encountered, and their journey probably set some thoughts in motion to make it possible for me to consider joining Chris when I met him a few years later.

Nearly 12 years ago, they took an opportunity to move up to Philadelphia. It was a huge hole in my local sense of community, as happens when dear friends move away.

One of the delights of a mobile lifestyle such as ours is the ability to bridge those divides.

I may not see my friends on a weekly basis like before, but our travels have allowed for many stretches of quality time together over the years that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

As soon as we knew we were heading north, I reached out to Barb to see what her summer was like.

She’s currently a graduate student at Temple University, pursuing her craft of jewelry artistry.

Philadelphia is one of those large cities that just isn’t easy to RV in. Roads are tight, and there are hardly any RV parks surrounding the city, never mind in the city.

On previous visits through we’ve been able to park our smaller RVs on the street in front of her home – but there’s just not enough space for our now mansion sized bus.

So she hooked us up with a friend who lives on a farm on the outskirts of town for some sweet driveway surfing.

It still required a commute to get together, but that didn’t stop us from spending copious amounts of time together. And there was lots of indulging in Indian, Thai and Tex-Mex meals.

It was wonderful and soul enriching. And just the stuff I love that our nomadic lifestyle enables.

When friends move to a new town – it just means we visit them in a different location.

Lackawanna State Park – Dalton, PA

We received a 4th of July invitation to driveway surf near Utica, New York – which set our general trajectory.

I hopped on Reserve America to see what was available in between Philly and Utica for a few nights – and came across Lackawanna State Park (our review) just north of Scraton. Perfectly positioned to close the gap, and get in some dedicated work days in-between two primarily social visits.

The park is lovely and peaceful – once we were settled in.

It has 3 loops, two of which allow pets. The loops are a mix of non-electric and electric sites. Since it is heavily treed (not optimal for solar), we opted for an electric site on the Fox Run loop.

I checked satellite maps in advance to pick a spot that would give us the greatest sense of privacy – but that didn’t prepare us for how unlevel the sites can be.

Our site was pretty level, but had quite a ‘slope’ that we almost bottomed out on backing in. But, we got in and enjoyed our very productive stay.

Our big projects right now involve a new round of cellular signal enhancing testing – including the new:

• weBoost Trucker/RV Antenna
• BoatAnt 2 MIMO antenna
• the finally shipping Max-Amp Mobile Booster.

We used this stop to get some of the gear installed and begin initial data collection. We’ll be testing at several stops for the rest of the summer to be able to report back on what works best.

We’re also hard at work continuing to roll out our brand new Mobile Internet Gear Review Center at RVMobileInternet (the site we host dedicated to the topic of mobile internet – aka our ‘day job’) – loading in products & services RVers use.

 

All and all, a peaceful stop in a gorgeous area of the country.

We were there just prior to the 4th of July weekend and we had to move on to our next stops.

But those tales will come in a future post.

What’s Up Next?

We’re still a couple weeks behind on the travelogue (I promise, I’ll get caught up one day!) and are presently working our way into the Adirondacks of New York.  We’ll likely spend the next 10 days roaming around these parts before heading over into Vermont for Escapade.

We’re still holding intentions of exploring VT, NH and ME for the rest of the season before heading back south to Florida for the winter. We’ve gotten a few very sweet driveway surfing offers that we hope to be able to accept in the coming months.

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Next Live Video Chat: RVing with Cats

We’ve scheduled our next live (and free) video chat for next week:

When:  Thursday, July 21
9 pm EDT / 6 pm PDT

Topic: RVing with Cats

Kiki adopted us when she was a 7 week old kitten, and has been raised on the road in an RV. In this video cast, we’ll talk about RVing with cats.

Topics we intend to cover include: leash training a cat, varying pet rules at campgrounds, keeping them safe in a small space that moves, managing veterinary care on the road, litterbox placement and just in general being good cat servants.

This chat will have a lot of content that can apply to other types of pets (dog people are welcome) — but it will be focused on cats in specific, as that’s our experience. In the future we hope to team up with other RVers to do a more general RVing with Pets’ topic.

And who knows.. maybe Kiki will grace us with her presence during this chat?

Join the Chat on our Livestream Channel

You will need to create a quick free account with Livestream to view the video cast. Just click the link and setup an account in advance… a couple minutes ahead of time should be sufficient, but you can do it anytime. At the end, we’ll be happy to field questions. And if you can’t make it, you can catch the archive later.