The countdown is now 14 days before we head west. First we have a shorter trip to Pennsylvania for a family gathering scheduled to begin a week from today. Next Friday, we’ll get on the road as early as we can to meet up with members of the Tracy family and friends at Seven Springs Resort near Bedford, PA. Even though we have only about 48 hours to share with each other, we usually manage to pack in a lot. Here are a few examples of what we can/will do.

              Seven Springs!

For those of you interested in the history of places you visit, see http://www.westpennmiataclub.com/mmm10/docs/history7.html to discover the connection.

My own memories of Seven Springs date to the early 70’s, and they’re limited to the ski lodge and the slopes covered with snow. Later in 1995, I returned during a visit with my father, and we stopped in to see the new lodge. In between those years, the resort grew steadily and has changed hands a couple of times. But it was born out of the love of a man and a woman for the Laurel Highlands country that you’ll learn about in the link above.

Seven Springs is also known for its innovations: in the 60’s one of the owners’ sons invented and patented the Millennium Snowmaking Gun that is used throughout the world. More recently, the resort has won awards for its innovative water conservation and solar panel techniques used in its snowmaking system. You can see the details of these systems and the rest of the history of Seven Springs from where the above article leaves off at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Springs_Mountain_Resort.

Returning to Seven Springs Resort was like greeting an old friend. In the winter of 1970, I’d skied there and taken plenty of tumbles on the bunny slopes. My best recollections are that it was a small ski resort with great slopes and a fantastic indoor swimming pool. We were newly married, and by all the economic indicators, we were officially “poor,” so any resort felt like luxury to me. Then, in the spring of 1995 I’d visited there with my father, our last trip together before he died. I was awed by how much it had grown. In the interim the resort had grown a collection of chalet villages and now offered an assortment of restaurants. A family owned resort for a good fifty years, it had ensured its longevity by selling out to a corporation that knew best how to manage thousands of guests. This was my first visit to Seven Springs in the summer, and it didn’t disappoint. They accommodated without too much eye-blinking our family group of 33, half of which are between 1 and 13. Hiking, water-chuting, swimming and eating were all well-addressed right on campus. None in our party tried out the zipline, but it sure looked like fun. Idelwild Park in nearby Ligonier kept the entire range of kidlets occupied and happy for most of Saturday. The Soak Zone nearly pulled me in despite my lack of a bathing suit; the wave pool there is something I definitely want to try next time. Instead, the old folks headed off to the historic part of Ligonier where we had a very healthy and delicious lunch at an old Victorian home. Who’d have imagined we’d discover a new variation on a grilled cheese sandwich? (Spicy grilled vegetables tucked inside cheddar cheese made all the difference.) Afterwards we explored Main Street shops to work up an appetite for an ice cream cone at the Ligonier Creamery. The gem of the afternoon was discovering Celtic Culture, a store filled with Irish goods, (the only other one I’ve seen outside of Ireland was in Cambridge, Massachusetts), where I spoke with shopkeeper Andrew Carr. By the time we finished talking, we were convinced we were related. Visiting Seven Springs was like discovering an old friend who’s gotten better as he’s gotten older. I was pleased that our younger generation embraced the concept of a central location where getting their growing families together was no more than a 5-6 hour driving burden for anyone. Perhaps this will be our recreation center for the future, perhaps we’ll find a better place yet. But I’m quite certain that we’ll all return again sometime, hopefully together.