East Coast Day #9 - Pennsylvania Coal Mine!

After leaving Niagara, we drove 5-6 hours south through New York to Pennsylvania. Our eventual destination was Sesame Place down in Langhorne, but since we didn't have to be there until the next day,  we had plenty of time to lollygag. We ended up bunking in Scranton (home of Dunder Mifflin) so we could check out a coal mine tour (that appeared to garner some great reviews online) the next day. 

Back in 2000, Rich and I went on a salt mine tour in Krakow, Poland that we ended up enjoying tremendously. So we'd hoped Ryan would get to enjoy a similar experience. The next morning we headed over to the Lackawanna Coal Mine to see if we could squeeze in with/join another group since they were booked solid that day. As soon as we got there, we were not only able to join a group, we were able to join an Amish group...which nearly put me over the edge. Those of you know me may know that I have a longstanding fascination with the Amish culture, definitely the inner historian in me. 

Damnit woman! Don't you ever learn?! The bags don't unpack themselves and we're hungry!!!

My son and his refugee-looking mother standing next to a giant chunk of anthracite coal (anthracite is a shiny coal that burns very clean, and is therefore quite desirable). 

The hour-long tour did not disappoint. Each group was led by a person who was either a retired coal miner, or hailed from multiple generations of coal miners. It started with an eerie 300 ft. descent on an original coal car into a chilly, pitch black coal mine shaft. We learned that what Saudi Arabia is to petroleum what Pennsylvania is to anthracite coal...meaning that we were standing on what was once a gold mine for the owners, and a place of dire circumstances for the those that worked in it. 

I think it's safe to say that coal mines in PA were the safety equivalent of say, garment factories in New York or meat factories in Chicago (pre-safety regulation/union days). You know, the days where if you lost 3 or 4 fingers, or perhaps even your entire right leg at work- the only thing you'd get was fired. Our guide (Tony) told us of his grandmother (then 5- years old) walking out her front door to find her father laying dead on the porch (that's how the dead were returned to their loved ones back then, they were unceremoniously dumped on the family's front porch). Here are a few pictures of our day down in the mine-

This is the group ahead of us ascending out of the mine shaft on the aforementioned original coal car, which was operated by a basic pulley system

Descending down the shaft (huh huh...I used the word 'shaft') in the coal car

300 feet into the Earth's crust (and only 20-30 feet above the water table...an unnerving thought). It was awfully dark, damp and chilly! But there's something about the smell of raw soil that I just love!

Rich was asked to "accidentally" capture the graven images of some of the Amish. This is why I love that man.

Rich and Ry in front of some anthracite coal (it's the shiny looking rock).

Ryan's thoughts on the mine? "This was NOT what I was expecting. It's scarier than I thought."

Getting ready to leave the mine and teaching Ryan where the expression "the light at the end of the tunnel" comes from. :-)

And since no day is complete with a stop at a park....we were lucky to find a great one right (our first in PA!) below the coal mine.

Later that afternoon we drove south to Langhorne so we could check into our hotel, which would serve as our park headquarters for the next three nights. We loved that it was located right across the street from an Amish Market, filled with Amish & Mennonite co-op vendors selling amongst other things- the most delicious fruit you could ever imagine. Rich pointed out it was likely because it's grown locally, organically, and in season vs. picked early to be shipped on a barge for a month). Ry was also thrilled that our hotel was located right next to a field of grass filled with thousands of dandelions. It became his daily ritual to stop there at dusk to blow dandelion seeds. :-)