Cumulative Miles: 5,129
Number of States Visited: 22
Number of Speeding Tickets: 1
Lesson Learned: Not listening to the news for six weeks might actually improve your mental health.
We're staying tonight in Oak Hill, West Virginia. We had originally planned to stay in the state capitol, Charleston, but decided we could press on a bit further, since Charleston was only three hours or so from our cabin in Kentucky. Travelling east, the countryside got gradually hillier and hillier. Welcome to the Appalachians. There was a hint of color in the leaves, but not much yet. Maybe we'll see more on our way back to PA in a few days.
We looked for some points of interest south and east of Charleston and came upon a lot of posts extolling the beauty of the New River Gorge. The New River is misnamed, because it is actually a very old river, believed to be one of the oldest on the East Coast. In Southern Virginia and North Carolina it's gentle, not too deep, and excellent for canoeing. I took a few canoe trips on it in my teens and 20's and they were magical experiences for me. Up here, in West Virginia, it has rapids and has carved a deep gorge in the Earth, not unlike the one we saw in Taos. Oak Hill was about an hour further than Charleston, so we found and booked an AirBnB there. It isn't fabulous, but it's cheap and sufficient.
For about 30 miles or so after Charleston, we were on Interstate 64 East/77 South. This was a stretch of road my family travelled when I was a kid, on our annual trek to father's parent's home in Southeastern, Ohio. Today, it's all interstate highway, but back then it was just the West Virginia Turnpike and it was a terrible, scary road; mostly just two lane with an occasional passing lane. I remember rusty guardrails, steep grades with tractor trailers either struggling to climb ahead of you or barreling down on you from behind. Rest stops were few and kind of sad and there were coal mines with steaming slag piles. Through the 70's and 80's they improved the road and brought it up to interstate standards, but even today, it's a twisting ribbon of highway that alternately climbs and plunges. I was glad when we exited.
After leaving the interstate, we travelled on a small state highway, climbing higher and higher. We passed through an unincorporated hamlet called "Whipple." I noticed that most of the houses, probably built in 1920's I'd guess, looked pretty much the same. I've seen that phenomenon in mill towns, where the company built all the homes for their workers. We were not near a waterway or mill, so I made the educated guess that these homes were for miners. This part of West Virginia is coal country after all. My guess was confirmed shortly after when we passed the "Whipple Company Store." Later I did some googling, and yup, Whipple was a mining town. The mine closed in the 50's. The Wikipedia entry for Whipple says this, "The Whipple Company Store in the Coal mining "heyday" provided everything the coal miner and his family would need. Although the Company Store had its benefits to the coal miner, it did not go without reputation. The coal companies owned the store, the goods, the homes, the miner, and their money." You remember that old song, "I owe my soul to the company store?" Well, here is an actual company store.
We found a Kroger's supermarket here in Oak Hill and we will be having a pasta with sausage in a blush sauce. I made the salad. I've been longing for a pizza for a couple of days, but I wasn't impressed by the looks of the one pizza joint here in town. Maybe when we get to my sister's place in North Carolina we can plan a pizza night (hint, hint).
