My Vacation, Part 7 of 9 -- Monday, July 27, 2009

[lblanchard]

Time to start retracing our steps. We'd both had miserable nights in our damp Ox Yoke Inn room, so we left as soon as possible and headed back to Wellsboro, where we had breakfast at the Wellsboro Diner. I had three eggs up, toast and coffee. Roy had two eggs up, sausage patties and coffee. The diner had cleverly located its rest rooms so that one had to traverse ye olde gifte shoppe to get there, but we both managed to resist its blandishments.


We walked around town, photographing whatever caught our fancy, but including the Tioga County Court House; the statue of Mary Wells Morris (wife of original settler Benjamin Wister Morris -- hmmm, two good old Philadelphia names there!), and a number of monuments in Packer Park. The last time I was in Wellsboro, all the street lights were gas lights. They're electric lights now, but the town remains charming nevertheless. Roy stopped to meet with Mary Worthington from the Tioga County Development County Corporation.. I wandered back down the main street to continue to take pictures.

Walking toward the park from the Wellsboro Diner, I had noticed flowers that seemed to be spilling from the sidewalk onto the street from a house down Waln Street. When Roy caught up with me, I suggested that he bring the car down there while I started walking that way. The house at the corner of Walnut and Waln Streets had beautiful annual and perennial plantings in its front, side, and rear yards. The owner was out on the porch doing maintenance, and I asked permission to take pictures. She was flattered and invited me to come in to the yard if she wished. She explained that she and her husband had devised the plantings for their own enjoyment and also to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and indeed there was a great profusion of monarda, buddleia, and many other flowers that would appeal to those species. Roy noticed her "Mansfield University Band" t-shirt and remarked upon it. She had played French Horn in college and played euphonium in the marching band.

Mary Worthington had told Roy that the Tioga Central had a frac sand transloading operation north of town, so we went out to look at it. It was the transload at the end of the galaxy, surrounded by farms, and consisted, so far as I could see, of a giant suck-em-up machine to be positioned next to the railroad track. A conveyor belt would be positioned below a railcar, a tanker truck would position itself just so, the railcar would open its hopper, and the portable railcar unloader (the proper name for the giant suck-em-up) would send the sand onto the waiting truck. Simple and elegant and if that transload were no longer necessary the unloader could presumably mosey on to the next location on its own four wheels. We watched the Tioga Central, a combination freight and passenger/tourist operation, jockey passenger and freight cars around on its various tracks until the appropriate track was clear for the transload operation.

Once the frac sand was flowing freely we left and went on to Mansfield, where we enjoyed McDonald's cuisine from the Dollar Menu. After lunch, proceeding to Troy, Roy photographed a train station while I photographed more Victorian houses than Roy had expected. It was a little disconcerting to find that a sign-holding highway worker near one of the houses, an African American, was startled and very pleased to be hailed with a friendly "how ya doin'?" I gather he was used to being invisible up there on the Northern Tier. We talked a bit about the houses. Are they museum houses? he wanted to know, and was I from the Museum? No, I said, I'm just a geezer on vacation.

We spent some time, and a false start, looking for the road to the covered bridge mentioned in our Route 6 book. I suggested that the small road just after the creek would work fine. It turned out to be Route 547. The roads are variously named Covered Bridge Road and Buttermilk Falls Road, vic. Rt. 6 MP 267/268. The structure was remarkable, with a Burr-Arch truss. I doubt the bridge ever gets direct sun -- its axis just isn't right -- but we got some nice pictures nevertheless.

With some time to kill before checking in to our hotel, we visited the Towanda Public Library. (Be sure to click on the photo and then onto the next to see the engaging terra cotta cherubs flanking the oval window). The library has open stacks that run behind the librarian's workstation, creating a delicious sense of going into forbidden places. Fiction is on the first floor; biography and nonfiction is on a mezzanine that's reached by a narrow iron staircase. We passed out of the main reading room through an opening flanked by massive wooden columns to the local history room to read up on local history.

Roy found a book about the railroads of Potter County, which made for a nice retrospective for him. I found a small work on French Azilum and a history of Bradford County that was written by Clement Ferdinand Heverly, who combines an antiquarian's love of detail with an historian's desire to create a coherent narrative. I could have spent the rest of the afternoon reading, but a big window looking out on the church across the street drew me for a few photographs….and then we saw the topographical maps spread out on the table and realized we were looking at the location of the natural gas pipeline that would take the gas from the Marcellus Shale to a northern New Jersey port (Hoboken, I think).

It seemed peculiar to spend a beautiful afternoon on vacation frowsting about in the library so we packed up and went off to … French Azilum. Again? Yes, again. This time I wanted to photograph a marker erected by the historical society in the early 20th century. I also wanted to get a closer shot of the French Azilum Methodist Church. It's a humble country church, and this building was constructed in the 1860s, although some of the burials are older than that. I suspect the church was built close to Homet's Ferry, which is a couple miles downriver from the Asylum settlement. After what seemed like an eternity waiting for the sun to come out from a cloud, but was probably only ten minutes, I photographed the church, and then wandered the churchyard in search of the gravesite of Charles and Maria Theresa Homet.

Charles Homet was the steward of Louis XVI and Maria Theresa a lady in waiting to Marie Antoinette. Unlike the many settlers who returned to France or moved to more settled (and warmer areas), Charles and Maria Theresa Homet remained in the area -- Homet established a ferry a couple miles south of French Azilum. Their descendents remain in the area to this day -- a remarkable connection between northern Pennsylvania and one of the most poignant times in the French Revolution. Our guide at the LaPorte house told us that a young Homet recently did an Eagle Scout project at Azilum.

While at the Azilum Church, we confessed to each other that we really really didn't want to spend our anniversary night in Scranton. So Roy called the Radisson, was told he missed the cancellation window and we'd have to pay $175 for the night whether we showed up or night. A couple of tantrum-y phone calls later, we were off the hook and happily booked ourselves into the Hampton Inn in Williamsport instead, where Roy would be able to visit a colleague at the rail yard there.

Refreshed and encouraged, we checked in at the Crystal Springs Motel. How I loved that room! The picture window offered a lovely view of the Susquehanna Valley in North Towanda. The room itself was wood-paneled, with a sofa, an easy chair, a desk, a small conference table, a refrigerator/microwave stand, and -- something I'd never seen before -- a screen separating the living and the sleeping areas. Also, there was a dehumidifier stashed in the commodious closet. The owners are big on being green, so the sheets were obviously organic and the room was full of little hortatory signs encouraging us to conserve and recycle.

We asked for a dinner recommendation and the owner suggested Villa Sena in South Towanda, so we called for a reservation [unnecessary] and drove down. It is clearly Towanda's "nice" restaurant, and was bought back by a second generation Sena after his parents had let it go. Prior to the Senas owning it, it had been built as a rustic getaway. The villa had a nice terrace but the smokers and some loud music were offputting, so we ate inside, at a booth beneath a large painting depicting an imagined meeting between presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, which owner Mike Sena told us had been there since at least the 1920s.

Our server, Judy, was a refugee from Deptford NJ, which she left because she'd had enough of "that element" after a career in law enforcement. We had Manhattans (such a surprise!), split an order of garlic bread, and had lasagna -- I had meat lasagna, Roy had spinach lasagna. Roy felt a little sickly overnight (from the cold, not the dinner!).




There are 82 photos from July 27, beginning here. All entries from this vacation are tagged "Anniversary Trip".