Watkins Glen, NY

We arrived at the KOA in Watkins Glen before noon. I have always had an aversion to camping at a "Kampground", for no particular reason that I could understand. Now I have a tangible reason for my prejudice. Ruth at the office assigned us site B-54, and we went on down to set up camp. When we got to B-54 there was yellow crime scene tape across the site, and the site was full of loose rubble and gravel. It looked like grave robbers had just left. I went back to the office to see what's up, but Ruth was clueless. She called Ray, an outside guy, and he said they had cut a tree and pulled a stump out of the rear of the site and hadn't finished repairing the surface. That's fine, but where do we park the coach? There were no other sites available for the duration of our stay. She had a site we could have for two nights, but we would have to move to another site for the next two nights. Finally Ray said he could fix the site. He would bring in some fresh gravel, spread it and compact it, but it would take about an hour. We really had no choice, so we checked in at the rally HQ while Ray did his thing. Amazingly he had gravel and a roller compacter on the site pretty quickly and was finished in just under an hour. It wasn't perfect, but it'll do. The Country Coach folks running the rally here have had other problems with the KOA and said they won't be coming back here again.

There are 34 coaches at the Country Coach Nor'easters Fall Rally. One must live in New England, MD, DE, PA, NJ or NY to join the Nor'easters chapter. We are one of only three guest coaches, so we are surrounded by Yankees, however, everyone here has been as nice as they can be to us. For a while we were afraid they had assigned us the war zone aka B-54 because we were interlopers from down south, but they assured us that was not the case. Right.

This afternoon we visited the village of Watkins Glen and Watkins Glen State Park. Watkins Glen SP consists of a 1.5 mile run of Glen Creek as it cuts about 600' down through a narrow gorge of ancient sandstone and shale before reaching Seneca Lake. In the early 1900s steps and tunnels were built through the gorge for the tourists. There are a number of spectacular waterfalls and pools. The Village of Watkins Glen was very quaint and unspoiled. It is a very nice area, and we are looking forward to seeing more of it.