Friday July 10th we're off! FIrst stop: Howe Caverns, NY

We finally hit the road! We left our little town around 8:00am and traveled through the beautiful Monadnock Region of New Hampshire, Vermont and the Hudson Valley of New York. We stayed mostly on back roads passing through small villages and farms. In the early afternoon we arrived at the famous northeast tourist attraction Howe Caverns, located in Howes Cave, NY. After enjoying a light lunch in the trailer we went off to explore the cavern and grounds.

The good folks at Howe Caverns run a tight ship, if Disney World had a cave this is how it would be run. We purchased our tickets and waited just under 20 minutes to be called for our cave tour. We spent our time looking through the small museum which records the history of the discovery of the cavern and it's being turned into the attraction it is today. When our tour was called we lined up with 28 other tourists and boarded elevators for the 156 foot descent into the cave. The air was quite cool, being right around 52 degrees (Fahrenheit). We followed our tour guide on paved paths listening to him outline the history and geology of the cavern while we admired the limestone walls. Towards the end of the tour we took a little boat ride on the underground river. The river is not natural, it was created by a water dam that was put in place to support a nearby limestone mining operation. Our boat stopped at the water dam and we looked down into total darkness in part of the cavern that is not included in the tour. There was a loud fan running so I ask our guide what it's purpose was and he explained that the cool air of the cave was being pushed into the buildings above ground to be use as natural air conditioning which I thought was brilliant. After our cave tour Leon and I explored the beautifully maintained grounds and took in the views of the surrounding hills. All in all a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. Howe Caverns in New York, I recommend it.

It was getting on in the day so we pulled out our maps to plan our route for the next leg of our trip. While I reviewed the travel options Leon listened to the weather forecast on our CB and discovered that bad storms that could produce hail were predicted in the area where we would be traveling the next day. Armed with this information we decided to seek an overnight parking spot closer to the highway so that we could get an early start in the morning to attempt to out run the storms. I used my Netbook and mobile phone broadband connection to search for parking on www.parkfreeovernight.com and located a nearby Walmart. I called the store (using the phone number provided on the site) and received permission to park so we packed up and headed on over. We were both pretty darn pleased with this Walmart. They had us park next to a field full of birds and flowers and the way we parked gave us a lot of privacy on the door side of the trailer. We enjoyed dinner in the trailer, did some reading and then went to bed early as we wanted to pull out by 6:30am the next day.