Eagles Mere Inn and 'Hurricane' Irene

Well, we are sitting out Hurricane Irene (now downgraded to a Tropical Storm according to the BBC website) in the ease and comfort of Eagles Mere Inn in the Victorian settlement of Eagles Mere, with the Eagles Mere Lake.  

Eagles Mere seems to us rather like Betws y Coed (famous for Swallow Falls) in Snowdonia – a very pleasant, upmarket Victorian town, of charm and with a picturesque quality.  Like Betws, which was very popular with Victorian honeymooners, Eagles Mere has long been popular as a tourist destination.  An early attempt at glassmaking, using the sandy bottom of the lake, failed, and left it as a very charming Victorian resort. The rather splendid museum, arranged by a Smithsonian scholar we were proudly told, has a photograph of a train arriving on the specially built narrow gauge railway.  Although the line is  no longer in evidence, the picture shows the train is as packed as those trains which arrived at Rhyl, Colwyn Bay, Llanfairfechan and those little holiday resorts on the North Wales coast inn their Victorian heyday - in this case ,  packed with later nineteenth century  American men and women getting away from it all, to sit on the porches of the hotels, and enjoy the walks around the lake.

In summer it was the kind of place where the family came, to enjoy cool fresh mountain air, while men laboured in the hot city and visited at the week-ends.  There was an inevitable decline, but a lot of thoughtful investment and working via trusts and associations has made this a very pleasant, though socially restricted, place to come for a holiday. 

The consequence is that it is just a very attractive place to come and spend time in late Pennsylvanian summer sunshine – children and families with small children come to enjoy warm sunshine, a small sandy beach on the lake, with typical American lifeguards and protected swimming area, walks around the lake, cycling, canoeing, all in the midst of an area known as “endless mountains”.

We have found it just so very relaxing, not least because of the very friendly hospitality and excellent food at this small B & B type inn.

Hurricane Irene is a different proposition, and clearly offers issues even in this part of Pennsylvania. Justin Webb opens his reflections of America as the BBC correspondent -  Have a Good Day -  both with the news that his mother was a Quaker, and a reminder that America is a big country.  Consequently it has big weather systems.  People not only die from bears, cougars and alligators, but from being caught in the huge weather systems – tornadoes, ice storms, and hurricanes -  which impact on this amazing geography.  We ourselves have some experience of this. When we were on holiday in Florida as a family, many years ago,, we were there in a Tropical Storm, and our roof fell in (as a little girl, Angharad came to complain, and believing she was having a nightmare told her to climb into bed with us and go to sleep; it wasn’t until the morning that we found a huge piece of plaster on her bed! 

There is a Quaker Meeting in Forkville, possibly a forty five minute drive away. In different times, we would have certainly visited it.  However, the wind was gusting, and I have heard too many reports after storms where someone was killed by a falling tree, and I wondered what was so vital that they ventured out in difficult conditions.  Just as well we stayed in, for within a short time we were receiving news of the road blocked both north and south, and people having to make reservations to stay an extra night.  We found an opportunity to just go down to the lake, just to get some fresh air and see the lake under different conditions. This is about as close as we felt we needed to get!

Tomorrow our friends Marcia and Tom come and collect us, and we go slightly further north.