The great non-catered Pennsylvanian adventure...

I'm not exactly sure how we ended up in Northern Pennsylvania today...but for whatever reason, I feel like Cayuga and I were in search of a breakfast nook that accepted Mastercard.  Truth be told, we've traveled hundreds of miles for much less impressive reasons. 

Anyway, in a desperate search for bacon and eggs, we ended up screwing around Allegheny National Forest.  Located in Pennsylvania, and encompassing over 512,000 acres of territory (I just looked that up and might have pooped a little...WOW that is big).  There are many popular sections of ANF, but one of the more popular is the Kinzua Dam region.  The dam is considered one of the largest dams east of Mississippi River, and certainly an impressive sight to behold.  The dam in-turn created the Allegheny Reservoir.  The reservoir is 24 miles long and covers over 21,000 acres.  That's a whole lot of water folks.

What's that mean to this story?  Not much.  I'm just super fascinated by the stuff I just learned.  Haha.

Seriously though, our trek took us to the reservoir, and a spot called Rimrock Overlook.  This rocky bluff overlooks the reservoir, and boasts rock formations that are multiple stories in height.  Check out the link - because this is a most excellent spot (especially "the tunnel" and some of the caves in the area).  There's a couple ways to visit Rimrock Overlook.  The first being you can drive up the mountain and make the short walk to the cliffs.  The other is start down by the reservoir and hike the Rimrock Trail up.  Doing half of the latter was our plan of attack today - seeing as there were a couple new caches that we wanted to check out - one called Rimrock Trail Cache by Kcepenn being approximately halfway up the trail.

I know I know...I've bored you to death.  How about a picture?  Here's what the trailhead at the bottom looks like:

From there we started our journey by finding a pretty quick park-and grab, before finally sinking our teeth into a little "in the woods" hiking.  The trail was beautiful - and of course very much uphill.  Haha.  I didn't complain too much (which is normal hiking faire when uphill hiking becomes involved).  And because you're   been oh-so-amicable about reading this blahg, here are some more pictures to ogle over:

The start of the Rimrock trail before all that fun uphill stuff.

Cayuga doesn't only find caches...

The sun peeking through the ANF woodlot.

Aww...ain't he just the most precious thing.

More fun in the woods!

At the bottom looking toward a small portion of the reservoir.

Work it baby.

This venture out into ANF was exceptional, and from there we made a few other stops before slowly starting our way north.  There were a myriad of other new caches, but most of them were pretty unimpressive, unimaginative and unscrupulous.  All that junk aside, there was one particular spot that I loved.  It was located in Frewsburg, New York in a park called Erlandson Overview Park (and the aptly named Erlandson Overview Park Cache by the Carlsons).  How the hell we landed in Chautauqua County, New York is beyond me, but what we discovered was one of the highest points in the county, which if you looked nice and hard, you could see Chautauqua Lake off in the distance.  And in a Szuchie's Grand Escape first, we're going interactive!  Think of it as a much more interesting "Where's Waldo?"  See if you can find it in the picture below:

Trust me...Chatty Lake is in this pic somewhere...

The hills are alive with...breakfast I hope!

A great vantage point from Erlandson Overview Park.

Plenty to see here - and some nice trails to boot!

From there Cayuga and I slowly wrapped up our whirlwind adventure.  Ironically, after spending several hours driving all over Western New York and Northern Pennsylvania, we never did find a breakfast joint that would take credit cards!  We failed...but hey, we had fun in the process and saw some pretty sweet sights!