False Start

Since Jess’s flight was due to get in at 10am on Saturday morning I decided to leave after work Friday night and drive to Wilkes-Barre, PA to get a head start. I was pretty nervous all week because there was a major Nor’easter heading up the coast on Friday but luckily it decided to stay further east and I had clear, dry roads the entire trip down. I stopped in Elmira, NY to grab dinner at a McDonald’s and while I was waiting for my order an irate drive-thru customer had come inside and proceeded to yell at everybody for messing up her order. The manager relayed the message to the employees and one of them got pissed off and started yelling so then the manager started yelling and next thing you know, the employee quits. Meanwhile the guy who is supposed to be fulfilling my order is standing there with the bag in his hand watching it all occur. Quite the "rest stop".

Anyway I left my hotel bright and early Saturday morning after checking that Jess’s flight was on time. About halfway to Philly I hear my phone beep, indicating a text message. I immediately thought “that had better not be Jess because she’s supposed to be on a plane”. But of course, it was, and she informed me that her plane was delayed. I continued on towards Philly and when I was just outside the airport I checked back in with her and she was still on the plane in Florida! I decided to go ahead to Fort Mifflin (which is literally separated by a fence from the airport runway) and wait for her. Check out the plane coming in!Upon paying my entry fee at Fort Mifflin I quickly realized that this was not a National Park site. WTF!? I thought to myself. I pretty much exclusively visit only NPS sites and I was pretty confused as to how this fort had ended up on my itinerary (I had started this itinerary back in October though so who knows what I was thinking). Only later that evening when I was telling Jess of this did she mention that she had wanted to go there because she had heard it was one of the most haunted forts in America! As soon as she said that, I vaguely recalled her telling me about it. Later in the trip we even watched a Ghost Hunters episode dedicated entirely to Fort Mifflin. Thank goodness I didn’t know that beforehand or I would never have gone in alone. I walked around the Fort and found a trail that led back into the woods. While wandering around I came across these little cells hiding in the woods.

For some reason the pictures looking into these things were the only ones with "blurs". HmmmI had no idea what these were but I went inside anyway. I found two of them before the trail petered out so I turned back around and walked through the rest of the Fort. That was when Jess called to say that now her flight would not leave until between 1 and 3pm! At that point I decided to leave the Fort and just go and do what we originally had planned for the day.