Back to the Lake, via State College and Kinzua Sky Walk

7:11

Kinzua Sky Walk

Sky Walk

View of Kinzua Valley

Wreckage of Bridge from Tornado

On the Sky Walk

Penn State Campus

Penn State

Back at the lake, up at 6:30, as a dark blanket of clouds looms off to the east, perhaps a storm?  It's  forty degrees outside, the lawn covered with leaves, wet as it rained some last night.  The fire place is lit, the living room warm and cosy, as it's good to be back in our home.

Yesterday, as I mentioned, we relaxed in our Hampton Inn till about 10:30, when we drove in to the heart of the Penn State campus.  We walked quite a bit, enjoying some of the great shops, but mostly, we enjoyed walking through the campus quad, filled with students of all different cultures, surrounded by these amazing buildings, most fifty to sixty years old, if not more, which blend in nicely with the newer buildings from the past twenty years.  It is an amazing campus,  the landscaping and trees, especially in the fall, and as Evie said, no wonder they call it Happy Valley...everyone seems happy.  We found a Turkish restaurant, called Penn Kebab, just a hole in the wall, talked with the proprietor, who is from Istanbul, ordered a Turkish pizza and doner kebab and enjoyed it immensely. The place had been open about nine months ago, and he makes everything from scratch, even the phyllo dough or pizza dough.  It is a great place.

We then drove for a couple of hours, mostly through the hills of Pennsylvania, to the Mt Jewett area where we visited the Kinzua Bridge State Park, something I have been wanting to do.  It's a viaduct that spans a gorge of 2053 feet and is 301 feet high. It built by a coal company to bring coal, via train to their major cities.  It was built in 1881 in 94 days, using 125 iron workers.  By 1900, because the locomotives and products had become heavier, the framework was replaced with steel girders.  It stood  and functioned until the early 1950's.  It the 1960's it became a centerpiece of the park, until 2003 when a tornado, with winds of over 112 miles per hour, hit the area and destroyed many of the towers holding up the viaduct.  In 2011, the viaduct was reinvented as a Sky Walk.  Fortunately, we had nice enough weather, so we could enjoy the 300 foot walk out to the tip, to observe the destroyed steel framework in the gorge, the destroyed hillside of down trees, witnesses to the power of the 2003 tornado.  Neither Evie nor I could look down, over the side, without feeling queasy, a couple of puppies.  And, to make it even worst, at the tip of the bridge, they had a 10 squared foot glass floor, so you could look down 300 feet.  Needless to say we didn't. It was well worth the drive, and there were a couple of other vantage points, from which you could view the bridge and the spectacular valley, awash in colors, shapes, contours, and mist.

We got home about 5:15, having driven close to 475 miles in 36 hours, a great road trip.  Soup and cheese sandwiches for dinner as we watched the Al Smith dinner from NYC, listening to the two presidential candidates attempt to be funny.  Sometimes they were.