October 16-17
I had a drive of a little more than three hours on Sunday to get to Clearfield, Pa.
My first plan was to spend a night somewhere else after Stroudsburg and then stay Monday and Tuesday in Clearfield, where as usual I’d visit Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub for elk and ale.
When I first checked the Choice Hotels website to book my usual place, the Comfort Inn, it was not listed. I assumed it was full up.
So I booked at Red Roof nearby. I was able to use some points that were about to expire.
When I checked Denny’s for current hours, the website said the place is closed Monday and Tuesday “until further notice” because it’s short of help. I had forgotten that.
So I needed to book Sunday night in Clearfield, after all. That’s when I learned that the Comfort Inn had been renamed Wingate by Wyndham.
Wow, Wyndham has taken over another of my favorite living quarters.
The company bought La Quinta a few years ago. The La Quinta in Fairfield, N.J., is the closest thing I have to a home now. My storage shed is next door to it.
I decided to try Wingate for a night to see if it had changed.
Wingate seems only to be a rebranding of the location, though.
I don’t know when Wyndham took over, but I can see that the hotel on the hilltop is still very well kept.
I’ve stayed here a few times. The rooms have always been very comfortable. This time was no exception. The building has been open for a while and still looks brand new.
I hope it continues that way under its new name.
Denny’s was busy when I got there. It always is. The beer list was long, as expected, but most of the IPAs were imperials running 8 percent alcohol or more.
If I’m driving I want to limit the strength of my dinner drinks. I found something new to try, Robin Hood Hazy Valley IPA, which was listed at 6.2 percent.
What a treat that was. It was a great mix of malt and bitter. It had a mild perfume. The aftertaste was so dry it made me want to pucker.
The elk burger was excellent. It’s a little sweeter than beef and not as fatty.
I also tried East End Fat Gary Nut Brown Ale. It was almost a near beer, at 3.7 percent. It was on nitro, and so I wanted to try it. It had the right color but was thin on malt flavor. It was bitter enough, but still too much like water.
Monday was another day to kill more than three hours. I was moving only two blocks to Red Roof. Still, checkout time at Wingate was 11 and my new digs likely wouldn’t be ready until 2:30 at least.
I wound up taking a ride to a couple of state parks, both of them dating back to the reforestation of the area by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They are both inside a state forest called Moshannon.
The first one I came to was named for Simon B. Elliott, a state legislator and an early conservationist.
The weather was chilly and windy, so I didn’t spend a lot of time outside. But I was able to walk around some of the log cabins built by the CCC. Many are still in use.
I tried to find the Wallace Sphagnum Bog. I mean, who doesn’t love a bog, right?
I saw one sign for it and then nothing more.
I went a few miles farther to Mud Run Road, which brought me to Parker Dam State Park. The current dam was built by the CCC in the 1930s to create the recreational lake that is a major feature of the park.
It’s on the site of an earlier dam created by a logging entrepreneur named William Parker. It was used in the 1880s to control the flow of logs to a sawmill downstream.
In the same building where campers register, there is a classroom full of stuffed specimens of local wildlife. I took several majestic photos. They were very clever and wonderful, but my camera couldn’t get into focus, so they are all lost to posterity, just like hundreds of Classical Greek dramas.
I got back to Clearfield and killed time near Red Roof at Fun Central Family Restaurant.
The place offers pizza, wings, burgers and an arcade. In a large room, where no food or drink is permitted, they have a large climbing gym with plenty of netting to keep kids from falling onto the floor. The sign outside also says there is laser tag and something called black lite golf.
When I came in to buy a cup of coffee so I could use a table, a small boy ran screaming from the arcade into the restaurant. Talk about excitement. This was it. Toys on this scale must all be bitchin’ good stuff for a five-year-old.
Who knows? I might have been screaming, too, if I was in my second childhood. But I skipped that. I went directly to second adolescence. It’s a hell of a lot more fun.
The Champion in the photo of the day is in the restaurant. Kids used to ride it for a quarter, but inflation has caught up with rocking horses. The writing on the side notwithstanding, it now costs half a buck.
I nursed my coffee while I started this writeup. I downloaded some pictures. I deleted the fuzzy ones.
There was a room ready at 2:30. I asked Jessica at the desk how long the place had been a Red Roof Inn. It has been Red Roof since 2017, she said. Before that it was a Rodeway. My heart sank. Before that, a Knights Inn. Uh-oh.
I walked in to one of the most delightful surprises of the trip. Right up there with the Frazetta Museum. This was the best Red Roof I have ever seen. No holes in the paint. The plumbing is shiny. The floor is some kind of faux wood and immaculate, even though the door of the room opens directly to the outside.
What a laugh-out-loud relief.
Dinner was at a local bar, the St. Charles Cafe. I don’t know the origin of the name, but it did put me in mind of Europe, where they commonly name bars after cathedrals and churches across the street.
The St. Charles permits smoking at the bar, so I sat in the dining room and was the only one there for a while.
They cook pork chops with the bone, far superior to boneless.
They aren’t used to beer snobs. The waitress wasn’t sure if they had an IPA. Sometimes they do. She’d go check.
I tried to be as flexible as possible without having to drink a lager. Bring me any ale, I said.
She came back with a bottle of New Belgium Fat Tire. I didn’t expect that.
Fat Tire is an amber ale, so it’s sweeter than IPA, but with the meal it was a pleasant change.
I had two and drove home.
And now I’m getting ready to wrap this up.
Stay well and happy, everyone.
And be kind to the elks. They taste great.
Love to all.
Harry
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