After nearly two years of living less than 10 minutes from Mohican State Park, the desire to wander won. Despite making so many amazing memories on our homestead, raising amazing animals and building friendships we will never forget, the memories we made on the road won out.
We sold our homestead last week and immediately began to make preparations to head east before winter weather could catch us. Before we could go we had to make sure our vehicles were all ready for thousands of miles on the road. My truck got new tires a few months ago, but some kind of spring thingys in the front needed replaced, Jarod’s truck needed new tires and we got that done two weeks ago. The camper also needed new tires, as they had last been replaced in 2018 and had somewhere in the 20-30k mile range on them. My truck and the camper tires were scheduled to be done the Monday after we sold our home. That meant we had to stay local and the only campground we could find was Mohican State Park. We hiked nearly 700 miles in Mohican in 2022, so spending our last few nights in Ohio in the campground there felt like a long goodbye to a friend.
Anyway, way off topic here.
The campground was sleeping. The leaves had all fallen. For the three nights we were there, we had few neighbors. The sky and the river looked cold. The ground was covered with frost every morning and the grass crunched as we walked on it.
The nature center cabin in the early morning had welcoming lights, but no one was home.
About 5am on the third night of our stay, I woke up to the weirdest smell. It first registered as fire and I jumped out of bed (and almost hurt myself) to run to see if the camper was on fire. It was then that I realized that the camper wasn’t on fire, but the dogs were gone. The door was slightly open and the stench in the air wasn’t fire…. it was skunk.
At 5:30am we were trying to figure out how to deal with skunk covered dogs, on the day we were suppose to head east for a 400 mile day. Needless to say, my Yukon now smells, our camper smells. Everything smells. We managed to find some skunk wash for dogs and it seems to be working, but we have to keep washing the dogs over and over. It’s like it works its way back up or something.
It was horrible.
Thankfully we were the only people there and the smell of skunk wasn’t going to ruin anyone else’s camping trip.
The play set at Mohican State Park was unique in that it had a mini zip line. Eliana spent most of her time at the playset going back and forth on it. Again, no one else was there, so she had it all to herself.
It was cold and Eliana’s dog Cookie was over her adventures to the play set. Shortly after this photo was taken, we bought her a little coat – at the same store where we bought the skunk shampoo.
If you haven’t had a chance to go to events at the Mohican State Park, you should. Kyle, the naturalist at the park, works hard to put on amazing events, crafts, learning events and more. If you have a chance to attend the owl prowl at Mohican, we 1000% recommend it.
Here’s a video from our lantern owl prowl. To say it made the hair on our arms stands up doesn’t quite do it justice. It was awe inspiring.
