We spent part of our vacation at Cacapon Resort State Park in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle. We had discovered Cacapon Mountain and the park on a previous trip through the area. After driving around the park and seeing the lake, lodge, and golf course, we decided to make it a vacation destination.
After checking into a nearby motel, we arrived in Cooperstown in early afternoon. We parked the car on the outskirts of town at one of the trolley lots. A few minutes later the Deerslayer trolley pulled up and took us downtown. Cooperstown is a small mountain village with one traffic light, but it has a lot of history.
After a cold rainy weekend in April, 1996, the sun finally came out on Tuesday, a day we had off from work together. We decided to drive out to the Catoctin Mountain Park near Thurmont, MD, for some hiking. The Orioles Opening Day had been postponed from Monday, so Broken Claw took his radio along to listen to the game.
For our first week of vacation, we had some vague plans for an outdoor adventure, but nothing definite. On Sunday evening, Trailwalker packed the car with everything we might need for camping, hiking, packbacking, swimming, and generally having fun. We finally decided to head north toward the Poconos, with our first destination of Hickory Run State Park.
On a beautiful fall Tuesday, we jumped in the car and headed to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Located at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, the town played a major role in the history of the canal and railroad industries of the 19th century. During the Civil War years, the arsenal and the railroad bridges at Harpers Ferry were extremely important strategic centers. Today the historic town is maintained by the National Park Service. We drove into town and parked the car near the train station.
The Northern Central Railway (NCR) Trail is an old railroad bed that has been converted to a recreational trail from Ashland, just north of Baltimore, to the Pennsylvania line. In it’s heyday, the Northern Central was a busy carrier of farm and industrial products between Sunbury, PA, and Baltimore, MD, with connections to other railroads of the Northeast. The railway also provided passenger service in its earlier days and carried President Lincoln on the way to deliver his Gettysburg Address in 1863.