May 31st, 2005 | 
Author: We spent this past weekend camping at Knoebel’s Camground and Amusement Park. The park is located in Elysburg, PA which is about 2 hours north of the PA/MD line. The sun teased us a few hours each day but mostly it was cold, damp and rainy (is that a word?). Despite that I can honestly say it was probably one of the best family trips we’ve had.
We met the sister and brother-in-law and their three kids at the campground and set up on our two adjacent sites. We lucked out in getting the sites next to each other since the campground was booked solid. We called to try and reserve some sites two months ago and just happened to call about an hour after someone who had the two sites reserved had cancelled. There were no other openings. We also found out that the Knoebels campground is already sold out every weekend for the rest of the summer. It’s definitely a popular place and with good reason.
The amusement park was fantastic. Knoebel’s specializes in aquiring older rides from other parks, refurbishing them and keeping ‘em running. They also have a few ‘new’ rides to keep everything up to date. Its right accross the street from the capground so we could walk over and not have to worry about driving/parking. Personally, my favorite feature of the park was the cost. Free. No Admission charge whatsoever. The rides are pay as you go and not very expensive. Normally they sell inexpensive ‘ride all day’ armbands on weekdays and weekends you purchase tickets for each ride. Luckly for us, on Saturday they had a special for Memorial Day and sold the armbands. The kids were at the park from open till about 9:30pm (minus some time to walk back to camp and cook up some dinner). The lines were very light because of the off and on rain but my kids are hardcore and just didn’t care about getting wet. We more than got our moneys worth out of the armbands ($15 each for the two youngest and $25 for the oldest).
On top of the whole amusement park thing, this was the first time any of the kids (on both sides) had ever been camping. They loved it. I’ll admit to being a bit worried about them sleeping in the tent at first. It did get down to the high 40’s during the night. A couple of sleeping pads, some generic sleeping bags and a couple of layers of clothes and we had no complaints about the cold nights. In fact, believe it or not, we had no complaints from the kids at all about camping. I thought for sure the oldest would be bitching since she starts whining after playing outside for more than 30 minutes at home, much less sleeping in a tent for three days. We took care of all the camping basics. Open fire cooking with cast iron skillets, burgers, cooking dogs on sticks and of course, smores.
We got home around 4pm Monday. The kids were so exhausted, they were all in bed and asleep by 6:30. Thats the sign of a good weekend. Even more suprising, at 7am Tuesday we’re literally pulling them out of bed to get ready for school. I can’t remeber the last time the boy didn’t get up at the crack of dawn, much less sleep for more than twelve hours. We’ll be doing that again. Though hopefully we’ll have a little bit better weather.
