A Rainy Weekend at Penn State: Ice Cream, Fog, and a Long Overdue Reunion

It rained the entire weekend. Saturday, Sunday, relentlessly and without apology. The sun came out on the drive home Monday afternoon, which felt like Pennsylvania's way of saying “you are welcome” and “goodbye.”

My heart was happy anyway.

We drove to State College to visit my husband's best friend, who moved to Japan a few years ago. Between a wedding, a cross-country move, COVID, and a quick stop in Syracuse, proper time together had been hard to come by. This Penn State weekend finally changed that, and the rain did not change that at all.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and headed straight to the Penn State campus, which is genuinely beautiful in that sprawling, tree-lined, big-college-energy kind of way. I will say, as a proud Longhorn, that UT Austin has it beat — but I am extremely biased, and I acknowledge that fully. What Penn State does have that Austin cannot compete with is the Penn State Creamery, which makes its own ice cream, is run by students, and produces one of the biggest and most delicious scoops I have ever eaten. I genuinely wish I had bought some to bring home. I am still thinking about it.

We got drinks afterward and found ourselves surrounded by undergrads having the time of their lives on a Saturday night, which did what being surrounded by undergrads always does — made me feel approximately 100 years old. We had a good time anyway.

On Sunday, we drove out to Bellefonte, a small nearby town that was worth the trip just to walk around. Then we headed to the Elk County Visitor Center and drove out to a scenic overlook, hoping to spot some elk. We spotted zero elk. The views were gorgeous, and I got some good photos. But we decided that luck was not on our side, and found a Mexican food spot and had very large margaritas, which turned out to be the right call.

The drive back from elk country was where the day got unexpectedly beautiful. The fog had rolled in thick over the hills, and we stopped because I could not stop — that kind of fog does something to a landscape that you just have to photograph. Some of my favorite shots of the whole trip came from that pulled-over-on-the-side-of-the-road moment with the fog sitting heavy over everything.

On Monday, the rain finally took a break. We walked around campus one more time, found some delicious matcha, and spent the last few hours just being together before the drive back to Boston. We left around 1 pm, and the sun came out somewhere on the highway home, which was a nice gesture from the weekend, even if the timing was a little on the nose.

It was not a trip with a big itinerary or a long list of photo spots. It was a weekend with a good friend we had been missing, in a place neither of us had spent much time, eating good ice cream, and looking for elk that never showed up. Sometimes that is exactly the right kind of trip.

Hook' Em from Big 10 country.