Pymatuning St Park PA

We came to Pymatuning State Park in Pennsylvania on Friday September 4th, and set up at the campsite.  It's a waterfront site, but to be clear there is a 1/4 acre of trees between our site and the lake.  

Here is the view out of our RV rear window.  A nice forest of trees with the lake visible in between them.  There is a path to the lake where we will launch the kayak from.  Kayaking will be done here, and done legally so we drove to the park office to obtain  a launch permit for our inflatable kayak.  After obtaining the $7 one week permit we did a little driving around the park.

Our first stop was the Stone Gate House for the dam which extends 2,400 feet across the valley with a max height of 50 feet where it crossed the old Shenango River channel.  All done back in the 1934 all so I could go kayaking, oh and to control flooding.  

And here is a shot of where the water flows out of the dam into the Shenango River, it is quite lovely.  On the park brochure one of the top ten things to do here is to feed the carp at the Spillway, and so we went drove on to the Spillway.

The carp, large in size, swam up to the railing and just kept opening their mouths for bread.  We did not feed them unlike plenty of others who came with whole loaves of bread to give them.   Not pictured here are the Canadian geese who also enjoy the free bread, it was a feeding frenzy. Here's a link to a video on our Youtube channel.

Here is the kayak all ready to launch.  But first I need to put up my dollar store scarf so that I can find my way back to this tree lined spot which looks amazing like a lot of the shoreline on the lake.

Thanks for the good idea Mike, it worked great.

After Kayaking, hanging a hammock down by the lake is just the place to be. 

The sailboats from the yacht club floated around the lake, circling around effortlessly.  There were some whistles that I could not determine what they told the boats to do but were fun to hear.

And here is a shot of Jim at the campfire.  The black bag is filled with scrap lumber that we brought from home to burn.  To the left of Jim is our neighboring campers really nice kayak that she covered to keep the campfire ash from falling on it, like I said it looked very nice.

And for a final bit of reality, here is the laundry room, conveniently located up at the shower house in our campground loop where we did our laundry on Saturday.  Thankfully, the $1 dryer cycle went for 45 minutes and dried everything - unlike what I remember from college when the dryer never dried everything. 

No picture of the small IGA grocery store we went to after church, but we are getting our chores done between all the hiking and kayaking.