28th Sept – 3rd Oct
We left the hills of Western Pennsylvania and the interstate highway took us through a bit of (reasonably hilly) Maryland into West Virginia, the Mountain State. The whole of the state is situated in the Appalachian region and poor Big Dave continued to earn his keep by either hauling up hill, or doing controlled hurtling down hill.
This whole area is beautiful. Forested hills as far as the eyes can see with very few urban areas and the highway just keeps going and going through it all. The autumn colours (or ‘fall colors’ for my American friends) are only just starting. The warm wet summer means that it has been a great growing season, the trees are not stressed at all and the colours will be late this year. I think I will miss the full display again.
Our next stop was in a odd campsite tucked in a hollow behind, and part of, a Days Inn, one of those amorphous roadside behemoth hotels with a conference centre. It was actually quite lovely, quiet and peaceful. By mid afternoon when we arrived it was hot and sunny so we could open all the vents and windows and dry everything out. Bliss.
In the evening we walked up to the hotel for a drink in the bar and to have dinner. The bar was a very small civilised carpeted nook incongruously called Mad Annie’s. Named for a 19th C crazy highway woman called Annie who had immigrated from Liverpool and terrorised the local area, it was majorly less spit-and-sawdust than the name suggested. The clientele was a mixed bunch: two business travellers who were both ‘fuller bodied’ drinking multiple shot glasses of apple liqueur and lemonade and couldn’t finish a medium sized pizza between them, a chap that looked like a lumberjack (by virtue of his size, clothing and facial hair) and was drinking rum and ginger, a chatty blind chap and us. (We were probably the most out of place if truth be told). It transpired that there was a group of blind people using the conference facilities of the hotel and the blind chap was a breakaway from the herd. One of his compatriots came to (unsuccessfully) round him up as he was making quite a good job of eating a huge basket of messy chicken wings by touch alone. Respect.
Our next three nights were in a town called Fayetteville, voted coolest small town in America by someone at sometime. This area is dominated by the New River Gorge, an old river in a deep gorge. Its past mining industry has been replaced by whitewater businesses and the area is littered with rafting companies, outdoor shops, outfitters, basic campsites and people driving around in Subaru Outbacks festooned with kayaks and lifejackets. The gorge has a rather magnificent single arch span bridge which opened in 1977. It is apparently the longest/largest bridge of this kind in the western hemisphere. Every year in October the fairly major road over the bridge is closed to traffic for a bridge birthday party weekend. About 800 base jumpers hurl themselves off and lots of folks flock to the area.
Here we offloaded TC in our nice wooded campsite and spent a few days exploring the area by truck, foot and bike. We drove over the bridge, drove under the bridge, hiked to bridge look-outs and sat under it having a picnic. It is safe to say that short of jumping off it, we ‘did the bridge’. We had hoped to do some white water rafting whilst we were here, but no-one was doing trips. At this time of year the river is usually at its best for rafting at about 3-8 ft deep. The commercial rafting companies don’t take out clients if the river is deeper than 14ft. Due to the wet summer the river is currently 17ft. Whilst watching the raging torrent of brown water go by as we picnicked, we were happy to be staying on dry land.
Nick a bit too circumspect to get any closer to the edge.
After Fayetteville our journey took us through a corner of Virginia to Tennessee, where we had another single night stay in a campsite near a town called Bristol. Although Nashville claims to be the home of country music, allegedly Bristol was its birthplace. Bristol is officially two cities, one in TN and one in VA, where the city line and thus the state line runs down the middle of one of its downtown streets. How complicated.
In the past week Trump had given one of his fan-club rally speeches near here. 97,000 people attended. The campsite had been chock-full of faithful supporters. Happily, not so much on our night here. There was a games room and a half decent pool table so Nick did his customary trick of beating me fair and square by about 5 balls. My defence is that I spent my university years actually attending lots of lectures and working hard. Nick played a lot of pool.
Next stop is Pigeon Forge in the Smokey Mountains to meet up with our friends from Detroit, the Family Thelen.