Shenango Lake

Shenango Lake is really not my kind of place.  As lakes go, it's nice enough.  And I was surprised to discover how pleasant the countryside surrounding the lake felt.  The lake has a pretty little swimming beach with lots of shady areas--for lovers of darkness like myself.  The campground there is noisy and crowded and overrun with poison ivy, but it has some beautiful campsites right on the water--which you have to reserve months in advance.  Camping there with the family was a last minute consolation prize when my trip to Africa got canceled at the very last minute.  I tested positive with COVID....

But I don't like car camping, and I really dislike conventional campgrounds--mostly because I want camping to be a silent experience...  This four-day camping trip came replete with noisy neighbors playing loud country music late into the night and running their incredibly noisy generators at all hours.  But they had four American flags waving in the breeze, so at least they were patriots, right?  Funny how a love of country, among a certain crowd, means exercising one's own freedoms at the expense of society and civilization itself.  

I mostly publish this blog post as a place to advertise my spectacular travels in Colorado, New Mexico, and of course West Virginia.  

To see photos from my very first (and so far only) ascent of a mountain higher than 14,000 feet, click HERE, HERE, and HERE.

For a fanciful visit to an abandoned church in New Mexico, go HERE.

Oh, and there's a link to a very cool trek in the Roaring Plains Wilderness of the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia, HERE.

For a weird experience I had on North Fork Mountain near Petersburg, West Virginia, go HERE.

If you're interested, there's a statue of Stonewall Jackson still standing and entirely unthreatened in the town of Clarksburg, West Virginia--100 miles south of Pittsburgh.  Find that by clicking HERE.  How has this statue escaped the righteous iconoclasm that's taken down so many others?