A Magical Realist: 20th Friendiversary Friendcation Roadtrip!

Alice and I decided to go on a roadtrip to celebrate the 20th anniversary of when we first became friends (we met at church camp when we were fourteen). The plan was simple: Borrow a telescope from Alice’s school and go on a trip to the Cherry Springs State Park in Coudersport PA. We’ve rented an adorable airbnb in nearby Galeton PA for two nights. Today was day one.

We started our trip by going to get the telescope. Here's a photo of Alice and the telescope so you can see how gigantic it is. We're gonna see the sky if it kills us!

Alice with the telescope.

Driving along.

On the way to PA we saw an exit for Worcester NY. Since we both went to high school in Worcester MA, clearly we had to go and check it out.

Me and Alice in front of the Worcester NY sign. We're trying to make baffled faces but I look kind of demented.

Me giving a thumbs up in front of a weird statue guy in Worcester NY.

Alice found a bug hotel.

Worcester NY had an inn called the Worcester Inn, so clearly we had to go there for food. It turns out, the inn is haunted! What?!

Ok. From what I gathered, the inn was built in the early 1800s. There have been multiple deaths at the inn including...

* A six year old boy related to the owner of the hotel died in the inn.
* Someone who died from a gunshot wound - possibly from being shot by the owner at the time?
* This death didn't happen in the inn, but a waitress at the inn intentionally ran over her landlord, loaded his body, in the back of her car, drove to the end of the road, and then pretended it was an accident. She was the first woman in NY to be executed.
* A restaurant regular died in one of the hotel's dining rooms.

People say they have seen different things: bright lights, the sounds of a child running down the hallway, orbs that appear in their photos, a full on ghost that disappeared into a wall. One ghost story is that a previous manager kept losing his socks and having to buy new one. He finally got rid of all the spare keys to his room so his socks couldn't be stolen any more. But they kept going missing. On his last day working at the inn, he opened his bedroom door and found all his missing socks scattered across his bed.

The inn has even had ghost hunters come with video cameras looking throughout the day. Apparently when the looked at the footage they saw a figure at the end of the hall who opened the door of a room, looked about, and then went back into the room. This happened multiple times in a row but the weirdest part is that the figure had the skeleton head of some sort of horse or donkey.

Alice and I in front of the Worcester Inn.

We did not see any ghosts. We did find an old phone that didn't work and we learned that a religious person obviously handles the wifi since they named it "JesusSaves."

Alice in the phone booth.

Alice waits for food.

JesusSaves Wifi.

After our stop in Worcester NY we continued on all the way to PA where we unloaded and chilled out in our air bnb.

Welcome to Pennsylvania sign.

Road to our air bnb.

Our air bnb.

Alice inside the air bnb.

I found this weird video "Day of the Gobblers."

Finally it got dark enough for us to do what we came to PA for - look at the sky! Here are three of my crappy photos of the moon. It turns out the moon is hard to photograph!