The North East Truck Camper~Jamboree!

Monday, Sep 23/2013
What a fun filled busy week! I usually can have enough time to



North-East Truck Camper Jamboree ~ Gettysburg 2013



write on the blog daily, but the activities at the campground, along with Gettysburg were enough to keep me away from the keyboard.
Let me start by the beginning of our arrival at Gettysburg Campground…Driving into the campground a day early, we got a site in close to the proximity of all of the action. Driving

 

from the office to our site, a truck camper couple waved us down and said “Where are you from?” “New Hampshire” I said! “Berlin” she hollered. “What!” I said. I was




They call this the "Plumber Butt Shot"
That's me under the large hat!

thinking, how in the world would she know we were from Berlin, NH. Well, here is the answer. Phil Slocom AKA (Muffin Man ~ known for his fabulous homemade muffins) lives in Groveton, NH, a town not far from Berlin. Phil is well known in the Northeast Truck Camper Jamboree group. He knew we were coming and sent an email ahead for them to give us a warm

welcome. (They certainly did!) Rob and Jayne located on a strategic corner lot greeted every truck camper and their campfire was open to many. Thanks Phil!
The Jamboree was our first dedicated jamboree. Mikeee ( a super organized person) had plenty of activities from Solar panel seminars to obstacle course dog races. He also had left time for us first timers to Gettysburg to visit the many Civil War memorials.

A perfect night for "Ghost Stories!"

We made many new TC friends and were invited to visit them at their home locations and in turn invited them to visit us up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
I don’t have the official numbers for attendance, but it was over a hundred truck campers and somewhere over two hundred and twenty people. (I think it is a record number for the East coast!)
The campfire get together was especially a good time to meet and share all kinds of stories. Angela and Gordon White from Truck Camper Magazine were parked just two sites down from us. They travel with their cat “Harley” who travels around the campground in an enclosed carriage. We actually thought at first glance that they had a (human) baby, but it was their special fifteen pound cat!
On Friday night, it was: a bring a desert to the pavilion…Yummy! On Saturday night it was potluck dinner and again there was plenty of vittles to chow down on. The raffles were next on the agenda. Oh, I forgot at five fifteen we took a group

picture and then one can see the whole TCJ entourage.
The weather was good all week except for Saturday evening when it started to drizzle all night. Sunday morning the skies were clear for our early departure after church service at “St Joseph The Worker” Catholic church. The ride from Gettysburg was sort of neat. We stayed on the interstate for a while, but soon I decided to parallel the fast interstate and travel a more country style highway and see the real Pennsylvania, New

Jersey, New York states. The back roads brought us into scenic farm lands, both Amish and commercial farms in the Pennsylvania area. New Jersey and New York were filled with many small ponds and lakes. The shore lines were dotted with, in the old days, would be called camps, but today they would be called lake shore properties and would be worth hundred of thousands of dollars. These properties were probably held in families from generation to generation. The trees were extremely large and no doubt

several hundred years old. The maples, oak, beach and ash seem to dominate the hardwoods. The ponds, some clear, others with Lilly pads were naturally in pockets of land that shot up to rocky outcrops. Now and then, one would find an old farm house abandoned and falling in. This was not the norm though.
Helen was doing the driving and was getting her road course training. It was not a fast road, but a road with many curves going up and down. She already had done the interstate portion of her hands on driving challenge and now it was the cornering, braking and switch backs. She is no stranger to driving trucks as she has, in the past, driven my F-550 Ford, six speed standard dump truck to some of my job sites. She is some lady! We finally decided to call it a night around eight o'clock and pulled into a Cracker Barrel Restaurant parking lot. We had dinner and confirmed that it was OK to park in the rear parking lot for the night. Winding down a little by checking email and around ten, it was time to turn out the lights and hit the sack. It was especially quiet all night, or, we were so tired that we didn’t hear anything all night.

That is what we did and saw!