Follow Us In Our Travels

10/28/12, Sunday: Spending some time in Barboursville, West Virginia, waiting for mail to come to the Post Office. It’s a drizzly day, cool. I think the highs are suppose to be in the 40’s. It was beautiful all week; highs in the 70s, no wind. Now we have Hurricane Sandy going to hit the East Coast and we’re suppose to get rain and wind from that. The WV mountains are going to get snow – I’m glad we’re not in there any more. We’d be stuck until it melts. We stayed at Walmart last night, debating which campground to go to for a few days so we can use electricity instead of the generator.

We made it in to West Virginia finally on 10/22.  Pennsylvania is a large state.

We were at Blackwater Falls State Park last week for a couple of days. It took forever to get there. It is twisty/turny, up/down the mountains, narrow roads – even Curt didn’t enjoy that ride. Once we got closer to the campground, the road improved. Thank goodness. I think I’m tired of mountain roads already. The campground itself was nice. There’s two areas – one with electric and one without. We took the electric; it was 30 amp, but that was fine. There’s 6 other campers in the two areas. While Curt did some cleaning on the RV, I used his camera and took pictures, and did some reading. We tethered his phone for the internet, but it was spotty, not consistent at all. We took a walk around the park that night and saw some deer walking through the campground. They weren’t afraid of us at all.

We went to Blackwater Falls gift shop which was near the campground. You can take a walk to the Falls, 214 steps to the bottom of the boardwalk. There’s an earthcache for the falls. After that we went to the lodge area and there’s a small waterfall there, along with a cache we did.

We went to the Canyon Rim Visitor Center and saw the New River Gorge Bridge. In October they have “Bridge Day” where people are allowed to walk on the bridge. There is no traffic allowed. People also can parachute from it. There’s a boardwalk down 200 feet; I didn’t count the steps but I could feel it in my legs by the time I got back up. The bridge is 876 feet high, an arch length of 2700 feet, bridge length of 3030 feet. It is the world’s longest single arch steel span bridge and America’s 2^nd highest bridge. There’s a gift shop across the road where I got a smashed penny.

From there we decided to go to Barboursville, a little way past Charleston and near the Kentucky border. On the way we’ll fill fuel at Pilot. We want to see if we can stay in that area for a few days and get our mail sent. We need the insurance papers and vehicle tags for the Jeep.  Back to the twisty/turny roads again.  As we got down to the bottom, we were right beside the New River most of the way. We passed a lot of coal mining areas.  There were a lot of places we wished we could have stopped for pictures, but no areas to stop along the way for us.  We got to Gauley Bridge, which is a town right by the river, that had a scenic view pullover. With the sun shining the way it was, we got some really nice pictures.

Lots of little towns along the water, and very few that had nice looking houses. Most of the back roads of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia we noted a lot of old buildings. They don’t tear down their old barns/sheds or fix them. Don’t know if it’s  a property tax thing or what. Looks like more of the poorer areas of the states.