St. Joseph's Church, Hazleton, Luzerne County

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been finding August to be rather topsy-turvy. We've had a lot of things going on around here which have drastically interfered in my ability to focus on writing. It's not helping me get the first blog book finished, that's for sure! But my birthday's coming in a few weeks and I'll be taking some time off for that, so I'm hoping to make use of at least a couple of those days. This will be the first year since the blog began that I'll be doing a post on my actual birthday (when I will once again be fortymumble years old); hopefully I'll have something special for the occasion. Or at least something amusing.

For today, I looked at my list of completed posts and realized that we haven't visited Luzerne County since April, so I thought it might be time to do just that. Let's take a ride up to Hazleton and visit the oldest Slovak Roman Catholic church this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Saints Peter and Paul Lutheran Church, Freeland, Luzerne County

It's very cold today, though at least it's not as gloomy as it was yesterday or is expected to be tomorrow. It has me thinking back to the much sunnier and more temperate day I enjoyed when I was last in Luzerne County. 

I had a great time on my visit to Eckley Miners' Village, except for one tiny thing: by the time I had finished walking the length of the little patch town, I was very hungry, and the souvenir shop only sold things like candy bars and bags of chips. I asked our tour guide if he could recommend a place for me to get lunch once I left the village, but before he could answer, another gentleman on the tour piped up and encouraged me to drive roughly three miles to the community of Freeland, and eat at the Freeland Diner.

This turned out to be a great tip and I again thank the gentleman for his recommendation. Not only was the food there very good and quite reasonably priced, but Freeland is home to one of my markers, so I was going to have to go there at some point anyway. (Also, if you visit the diner's website, you can actually see a picture of the booth where I was seated, which amuses me more than it probably should.)

Interestingly, not only did I conduct both the Eckley quest and this one on the same day, but they're actually related.