Category Archives: Pennsylvania

And so we prepare to leave Canada.  It was a lovely morning – much cooler and dryer than yesterday making it much more enjoyable to cover 4.5 miles (even if some was up hill so I could run along a higher ridge of the escarpment).  Breakfast was lovely again – poached pears followed by rosti with cheese and ham.  I had a slice of raisin tea loaf from the Irish shop to add extra carbs because there just wasn’t enough on my plate already! 🙂

Then we say good bye to the Crown Ridge B&B and Ontario.  I can’t recommend this place highly enough.  Michelle took spectacular care of all of us, me especially, and the accomodations were comfy and priced right. We headed south to cross at the Fort Erie crossing into Buffalo which took 15 minutes instead of the hour it took to get into Canada at the Queenston/Lewiston crossing. We confessed that we had more than our duty free allotment of wine and the kind CBP officer just let us pass.  Then we really started living life on the edge and we headed for downtown Buffalo to go to the one tourist attraction Gillian was interested in:  The Anchor Bar, home of the original buffalo wings!  She got to enjoy a plate of the famous wings (which she confessed that she didn’t like as much as those at Glory Days!) and then we were back out on the road headed for home.

But home was still 8 hours away.  And because so much time in the car makes me cranky – even if we are in a convertible with the roof down on a gorgeous day – I decided we needed to split the journey so we have stopped for the night in historic Clearfield, PA.  I haven’t figured out why it is historic but all the signs say that so it must be true. We found our B&B and we have yet another room with a deck which overlooks the west branch of the Susquehanna river (and one of the main streets through town). Clearfield is pretty small.  It does have more than one stop light but the culinary choices are limited – if you don’t want pizza, Chinese or any thing served in an establishment with beer and NASCAR signs.  (Hint: there are more gun stores here than gas stations.)

We wandered all dozen or so blocks of the historic downtown, noted that there are at least half a dozen churches within 100 yards of each other, and found what the woman at the B&B recommended as “fine dining” – Moena, an Italian restaurant with plastic table cloths but more than pasta on the menu. Our waitress was a gem and worked really hard to make sure I had a nice meal that I could eat – greek chicken with green beans (canned?) and red skin potatoes.  Gillian had the steak and Frank had pork medallions with sour cherry chutney.  Add a bottle of Arrogant Frog pint noir and it was quite a nice meal even if it wouldn’t qualify as “fine dining” in many other parts of the country.

After dinner Gillian headed back to the B&B to text and play with electronics and Frank and I walked an astounding distance along the river to the next town where we just happened to find an ice cream stand.  Fortified with dutch chocolate almond and moose tracks, we made our way back to enjoy some Canadian wine on the deck and watch the traffic roll by.  Our post dinner jaunt really racked up the mileage on the pedometer: 17,747 or 7.65 miles.