Prettiness in Pennsylvania

I am in love with Pennsylvania! We got here in the dark last night, so I wasn’t aware of what our surrounding scenery looked like until we emerged from the truck this morning to see this:

Lamar, PA

Mist over the mountain in PA

We headed out in a light rain which made the mist rising out of the mountains that much more beautiful. After about an hour and a half of taking pictures out the passenger window, I asked Mr. Trucker how many pictures of fall color and misty mountains was enough. It’s hard to know when to stop because I always think the next shot is going to be the best one, the one that’s going to make the cover of National Geographic. Today’s digital cameras also make it so nice because you can just shoot away indiscriminately and take names later  delete later.

So beautiful!

I think we can safely say that the fall colors
are at their peak!

Before I went out with Mr. Trucker, I never gave the trucking industry much thought. I mean, you want something, you go to the store and you buy it, and if they’re out of it, you get ticked off. I never stopped to think about how it got there in the first place. But really, trucks bring it, like the bumper sticker says. And as the years of my life have gone by, I’ve noticed the availability of more and more stuff and a much wider variety of choices. I mean back in the day when I was growing up, if my Mom wanted to make a salad for dinner, she bought iceberg lettuce (cuz that’s all you could get) and a couple waxy tomatoes. Nowadays, you can choose from about 17 different varieties of lettuces and field greens and you can have regular tomatoes, organic tomatoes, roma tomatoes, grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes...So with all this increasing plethora of choices on the store shelves, it stands to reason that there are an increased number of trucks on the roads. You notice it particularly late at night, when most occupants of cars are home in bed or in front of their TV’s. It’s as though trucks own the roads. And if you stop to think about it, those truck drivers all have to stop and sleep somewhere. A lot of times you see them just pulled off on ramps leading into and out of rest areas, and of course there are the truck stops. I don’t think I ever noticed that truck stops existed before I started frequenting them with Mr. Trucker. But truck stops have a whole counterculture all their own...you’ll be hearing more about that as time goes on.

Mr. Trucker is mad at me right now because I took so many pictures of misty mountains earlier this morning that the camera batteries died right in the middle of the bridge over Emlenton, PA, which is where he wanted me to take several shots. Mr. Trucker has been waxing rhapsodic about Emlenton every since he started trucking. It's this little village tucked away on the banks of the Alleghany river, and can be seen from way up high on the I-80 Emlenton bridge if you're heading west on I-80. It really looks very quaint and has almost assumed legendary status in his eyes. This is the one shot I DID get, and it shows the village, but not the river. Drat! Oh well, I’m sure we’ll pass that way again, but the way Mr. Trucker’s going on, you would think it’s like Brigadoon, only there once every hundred years...

Brigadoon, PA
Emlenton, PA

Gotta go now, dear readers. We're stopping for a shower and I need to start planning what I’m gonna wear to our impromptu get-together with Warren Buffet when we get to Omaha!  How do you prepare for lunch with a billionaire? I'll leave you with one last breathtaking, picturesque (or as Mr. Trucker likes to pronounce it: Pictureskwee) photo of Pennsylvania.

Ooh, aah

Today’s silly sounding place name: Punxsatawney, PA.