More Random Thoughts or Observations

Mountain Laurels, or rhododendrons, abound in the Pennsylvania mountains reminding me of home.

My whole experience from start to finish has been one of running a highway gauntlet. You only have to be left standing at the end to win.

There are too many idle Americans. We have a lot of potential and people need to have jobs.

An Ohio patrolman, thinking I agreed with him, said, “If people don’t like things in this country - there’s the door.”

I would say, “ If you don’t like things - what are you doing to try to change them?”

Wild turkeys now abound in great numbers.

I have found facing traffic more confrontational than moving in the same direction.

I’m not sure if I previously mentioned it, but I am now on my fourth pair of shoes.

Ohio doesn’t seem to have many tandem-trailer trucks. These are very common in the West and elsewhere.

Dead groundhogs are now showing up as roadkill.

Pennsylvania has a terrible litter problem. I rank it as worse than Idaho - the previous leader. The irony is that it has more “Do not litter” signs than any state through which I have passed.

Many of the people and establishments in this area seem to prefer being paid in cash and even have signs stating so.

It has been almost six months since I’ve driven a car.

Crossing the Alleghenies has been an up-and-down experience. Lay your fingers flat and imagine going over one and then the next and then the next and then the next and you’d have the idea.

I saw black squirrels in Western Ohio. I’d never seen these before or even heard of them.

My water consumption is way down. It just isn’t required in this cold weather.

Like everywhere, the large electricity producing windmills are now in Pennsylvania, too.

My old high school - the “Warriors” - has consolidated with another high school and together they are now called the “Redskins.” In Oregon this would be considered very politically incorrect and would never fly.

Roadkill is much more pleasant in cold weather than in the heat of summer. Nature now acts as a refrigerator much to my relief.

There seems to be many many more cigarette smokers here than in Oregon.

My donations from strangers is now closing in on $1000 without me asking for a penny.

To my surprise, the coyotes have moved as far east as Pennsylvania. Sitting with friends around an outside fire in Ohio I was shocked to hear them yapping. Originally they were west of the Mississippi but have been rapidly moving east.

I talked with a president of a small college who said that he’d like to walk across the country too.

Country People here still burn coal to heat their homes. It gives off a sulfuric acidity smoke that I hadn’t smelled since being a child.

The Upper Oho River Valley and the Pittsburgh area still has a very low Mexican-American population. This is quite different than the rest of the country.

I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but a couple of days ago I crossed the physical divide separating the east-west flow of water. Now all of the water flows into the Atlantic instead of to the Gulf of Mexico.

I have also crossed a social divide as the Pittsburgh area television stations have been left behind and they now originate in places such as York, Pennsylvania and Hagerstown, Maryland.

Prices always reflect what people will pay and are not the same everywhere. I just had two eggs, bacon, hash brown, a cup of milk, and coffee for $4.24.

So many of the houses here in Pennsylvania are made of stone and brick and seem much more solid than the houses in Oregon.

There’s something lonely about a cawing crow in the winter woods.