Day 13 - Wednesday, August 16, 2006

We ate the continental breakfast at the motel. This is the first time I had ever seen perfectly circular frozen egg patties. You put them in the microwave. They were tasty! Bill had cereal and a bagel. We packed up and decided to go to the zoo in Rochester. The people at the front desk said it was small but very good. Bill and I like small zoos, so we decided to check it out. It was not the greatest zoo, but the weather was perfect, and we had a good time. We took pictures of a bald eagle, elephants, and even monarch butterflies! We were back on the road in about two hours.
Several of Bill’s ham friends had asked him if he had seen Tim Duffy’s (K3LR)ham radio antenna towers on the way up to the Northeast from Kansas. They said you could see them easily from the highway, just on the Pennsylvania side of the border with Ohio. We had come from Ohio to Pennsylvania at night on our way east, and did not see the antennas. Bill wanted to be sure and see them this time. We weren’t sure exactly where they were, so we called Jimmy, who was at a computer, to tell us where to look. He looked up Tim’s address on the Internet, and we found out that they were on a totally different highway – I-80 instead of I-90. I-80 was about an hour and a half south of I-90, in a different part of the state than we had thought. We decided we could go that way, since it was also on our way home, so we headed off in that direction hoping we could make it there before sunset. We found his house and the towers, although Tim wasn’t home at the time. Bill took lots of pictures just before the sun went down. He said it was the most incredible antenna system he had seen in all his 49 years as a ham.

There was a McDonalds close-by and we had a small dinner there. Behind that McDonalds was a brand new hotel, a Best Western. We decided to stop there for the night.