Friday night in Mercer, PA

Thursday, 7/28/11 - We finally rolled into Pennsylvania and are staying at a very nice Coast to Coast RV park, Plantation Park www.plantationpark.net located in a small town, Mercer, PA. My first reaction when I saw the park was hallelujah, the grounds are flat and they have real roads, not rocks for my morning walk. This whole area back here is hilly and it's darn near impossible to take my morning walk without hills and my lower back is screaming for help.

Actually, this must be a "wild bunch" here as we were looking forward to bingo on Saturday night but it starts at 11 pm.......can you believe these people stay up that late for bingo? Forget it!!! They have a beautiful swimming pool, a store that serves fast food and a big lake for fishing. It is a huge place and we will leave here Sunday morning to visit with Wills friends, Greg & Andy.

Friday, 7/29/11 - Mercer is a small darling town, www.VisitMercerCountyPA.com that centers around the most beautiful Mercer County Courthouse Square, the building located there is huge and probably built in the late 1800's. We drove around the downtown area and found out that during the summer, located in Courthouse Square they have the Mercer Community Band that does a summer concert series. Tonight's theme is "Hooray for Hollywood." In 1977 Dr. H. Hoge, the current band director, started the community band, which performs each Friday night in June and July in Courthouse Square. People bring their lawn chairs and set up around the bandstand for a pre performance, which was a Barbershop Chorus and then the concert starts at 7 pm. There is also an ice cream social, where you can buy home made pies & cakes and ice cream, plus popcorn for ME. Will and I estimated there were probably 500 people there this evening for the concert. We had the good fortunate to sit next to a wonderful local couple, Ann & Robert who told us about the town and the area and we so enjoyed visiting with them through out the evening. Hopefully, we will run into them in Maine as they are headed up there in about 2 weeks and so are we. We had a grand time and it was a beautiful evening and just the perfect thing to do in Mercer, PA.

Saturday, 7/30/11 - Today was a great day, the sun came out and actually stayed out all day, which seems to be unusual for this area. There was a flea market here in the park this morning which Will and I went to and walked around. Of course Will has no patience for these types of things so we left early, which was ok with me as most was real junk! After that I did the laundry, one of my favorite ways to spend a morning while Will cleaned the RV.....his favorite.

After lunch, I decided to head down to Grove City, PA (7 miles from Mercer) as they have a huge and I mean huge Premium Outlet Stores. There are hotels, motels and lots of restaurants surrounding this place, the brochure says that over 6 million people visit this place each year. It makes Gilroy, CA look like a drive by. When I got there the place was already jammed and I had a hard time finding a parking space but persevered. I walked the entire place, not going into every store but seeing it all. It was a fun day and I used great restraint and only bought a couple of pair of black shorts.......just what I need, more black shorts! Returning home to take a well deserved nap and see what the evening brings. Much love to all our family and friends.