We got an early-ish start and again hit the back roads.
For the most part it was small towns and agricultural land. On one farm we saw an Amish woman standing on a plow pulled by a pair of asses plowing a field.
We stopped at a couple of state parks. The first was a forest with a small waterfall and it was so peaceful with few other people around, we loved it.
The second was by a lake in Bald Eagle State Park where we stopped for a late lunch, again very peaceful.

Best town names of the day, Boggs and Snowshoe. Best slogan for a company, on a septic tank service tanker: number one in the number two business lol

We got into State College about three and set about getting a bottle of wine and flowers for our hosts. We got to Sanjay's about four and chatted and checked out his awesome tank til Elena got home from work then it was cocktails and nibbles on the back deck.
We checked our emails etc and were surprised to see age of aquariums had changed hands with little or no notice, just boom! deal done. We'd heard rumours Ben owed some suppliers a lot of money so asked a few who were likely to be in the know what the goss was. It seems the new owners are Bens staff to whom he owed a lot of money, wages,super, holiday pay etc. he just signed it all over to them and took off before his debtors knew what was happening. The forums were full of people who as far back as three and a half months ago paid for equipment that was still not supplied! Don't like their chances of getting their equipment or their money back.

It was decided the easiest option was to eat out. They'd heard about a new place so we went there. Turned out it was a sort of American version of a tapas bar. We ordered a share plate each and split each one four ways. The food was awesome but we decided it would cost a fortune to try and fill the guys up so treated it as entree, paid the bill and went to a big sports bar which served way bigger meals than three of us needed, Pete had to finish his and over half mine so even he was pretty full by the time we left there. The bar was full of students so Pete enjoyed the eye candy as well as the food lol
The bar was showing a football game which S & E were following. They're all excited that there's a big game on Sat that they're going to. There's going to be a big tailgate before the game they and friends will go to & they invited us to stay a couple more nights so we could join them. It sounded like great fun and it'd be good to go with someone who can explain the game to us but we have committed to being at Tal's for the weekend so had to decline much as it sounded like a better offer lol
Elena and Sanjay then took us on a night tour of their campus. First stop was the Nittany Lion shrine, a large granite lion sculpture, the symbol of Penn State. On game days its protected by security guards as rival teams have tried to damage it in the past as is evidenced by the big crack on one ear.
Football is massive here, the staff get tickets allocated to them but the students get seats On a first come first served basis so many students camp out for days before each game in "Nittany City" in tents with coaches taking them pizza etc to keep them going.
From there we checked out the student rec room, bigger than most of our local shopping centres with a book store, food outlets, huge areas with couches and TVs, communal study areas and of course our main reason for being there, an aquarium. The aquarium was a gift to the campus from the class of '99 and now maintained under Sanjay as mentor.
We then took an amazing tour of the campus which is massive. It has everything a small town has and is only a few acres smaller than Redcliffe! The main football stadium has three times the capacity of Suncorp, over 100,000! There's a basketball stadium, indoor practice stadiums so the various sports can practice through winter, soccer stadium and a new ice hockey stadium built by endowment from an ex student who donated the $88 million price tag!
A tour of the town outside of the campus showed it to be a fairly typical uni town, lots of well attended bars; despite being well after ten on a Thursday night there were long queues to get into some of the bars.
Back to their place and Elena headed off to bed cos she has an early meeting tomorrow. We chatted til a little after midnight then headed off to bed where we caught up with all the goss re Ben til after one.