Road Trip - Day 7! (NY, PA)

June 1, 2012 (Friday)

Franklin D Roosevelt NHS - "Springwood"

After the free hot breakfast at the hotel we headed back to The Home of Franklin D Roosevelt National Historic Site. There is a $14 entrance fee for the tour, FDR Presidential Library and Museum. The National Park Pass gets you in for free! By this point you can probably tell that the $80 for the Annual National Park Pass is totally worth it!

There is a 22 minute film to watch at the Visitor center. The video was informative. After the video, we took the home tour, which lasted about an hour. The library and museum were undergoing renovations, so we did not visit them. The FDR home is known as “Springwood”. The tour was interesting and we were able to view many of the rooms in the home.

After “Springwood” we headed to “Val-Kill”, the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. Again, there is a fee for the tour, $8/person or free with the National Parks Pass. The grounds can be wondered for free. The tour starts with a 15 minute video and then the tour of the home begins. Approximately 50% of the interior furnishings are original to the home. If the tour has less than eight people in it you will be allowed to tour the upstairs of the home (fire regulations limit the number of people). The tour lasted about 45 minutes.

Orange County Choppers

Since our trips mostly revolve around me and what I want to see, I have to make Mike happy by visiting some places he wants to see, like the Baseball Hall of Fame. This time he wanted to visit the Orange County Choppers Store, the OCC show has been on TV for quite a few years now and he has watched pretty much every episode. The store displays some of the bikes that they have built and has a ton of OCC merchandise.  There soon will be a café opening inside of the building.

Delaware Water Gap NRA
 Raymondskill Falls

Our adventure continued to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. There was road construction going on in the area, so road closures were an issue that we ran into. The detour did take us past Raymondskill Falls, which we had not planned to visit. We hiked to both the upper and middle falls. The hike was defiantly worth the short 1/4-1/2 mile distance. The trail would be challenging for young children – lots of tree roots. After leaving, the hiking area we attempted to go to the Dingman Falls Visitor Center. Prior to the visit, I was confident that it would be open, but it was closed. There were a lot of other people in the area also, trying to get to the visitor center, maybe something happened there and they had to close – not sure. People were parking along the side of the road, but we decided to just head out to our next destination. Dingman Falls is a waterfall that is just a short walk from the visitor center – hopefully next time we will get to check it out. There are also many other stops in the recreation area, some of which were in the road closure area.

Steamtown National Historic Site

Continuing towards home, our next stop was Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, PA. The signage to get to Steamtown was above average. An entrance fee is charged at this site - $7/person ages 16 and over, free for those under 16 years old and for those with the America the Beautiful pass. We had an hour and a half to spend there before the place closed at 5pm. The site offers a 15 minute video, which was just okay. There are a lot of museum exhibits and locomotives, freight and passenger cars to view. We were a bit rushed with the time we had, but plan to spend about two hours minimum at the site. This place would be great for kids – lots of locomotives to walk on to and other kid activities through the museum.  The site offers train ride excursions, research before going if you are interested in partaking.

We spent the night at the Comfort Suites in Altoona, PA. The hotel was relatively new with excellent room conditions. Breakfast was included and had many choices, both hot and cold. There are a lot of campgrounds in the area, but once again it was rainy. We really lucked out on the rain throughout the entire trip, since most of the time during the day it was dry.