Broken Wheel Campground, Weston
Wednesday, 17 April 2019
[photo of route not yet available]
On our early walk in Chestnut Ridge Campground, the dogs and I all saw the deer at the same time, so this time I was fully prepared to haul them back to the RV. I just couldn't handle another morning like yesterday's.
When it got light we went back out, dodging potholes and other people's dogs. The online reviews for this place are glowing and I have no idea why. The online photos show lots of green trees and grass, which there aren't much of yet, but that doesn't bother me. None of the commenters say a peep about the roads, so I'm guessing they don't know how bad the roads get before they get graded for the summer tourists.
Yesterday when I was going to my campsite, I was followed by 2 parties with Class A RVs who watched me jounce and jolt my way to my site, and then they disappeared. Walking around the campground this morning I looked for them in the other camping loop, but apparently they decided against even trying to take their Class As into these sites and went to another campground.
One interesting note, though, is that this was once a CCC camp and there's a stone structure that's been preserved that's labeled as the oven used in the 1930s to bake bread for the CCC camp. I wished I could take a photo of it.
I wasn't looking forward to going back on the interstate because, just before the turnoff onto the campground road yesterday, I saw many warning signs about an upcoming dangerous hill. There were also signs saying trucks were required to stop to check their brakes, and cops were enforcing it when I drove by. I figured it must be a 9% or 10% grade with all those warning signs and thought that wasn't the way to start my day.
Instead, I found all those warnings were only for a 5% grade. Big deal (I thought). They even had a runaway truck lane part way down. I sure don't know what all the fuss was about. Come to think of it, there was all this fuss on a different interstate when I came into West Virginia a few weeks ago, and that was for a 5% grade too. And I'd think those were warnings for drivers not used to driving in mountains, except it's impossible to be coming into WV on this road - I-68 - and not have come from either southern PA or western MD. And drivers who were coming in from the south on I-77 would have just passed over all those western VA mountains to get there. Shouldn't have been novices at 5% grade mountain driving. Anyway, another worry not needed.
Morgantown
I wanted to drive around Morgantown a little just to see what it was like, and ended up getting more than I'd intended. I found a camera repair place online that looked like it wasn't too far from downtown so, first driving past the main West Virginia University campus, I went looking for it.
First I was forced to take a detour because of one-way streets I didn't know about, and then was trying to get back on track but kept encountering streets with signs saying too narrow for trucks - and they were narrow. So I was ready to give up the idea when I suddenly found the street I'd been detoured off of. This road would have been 2 lanes wide if it weren't for the cars parked along the side and the telephone poles that were set right at the edge of the street. So I was dodging the poles because of my side mirror, which meant straddling the center line, and then I found a whole line of dump trucks and semis with trailers coming my way. And they weren't intimidated by the narrow street at all and I finally just sat still and waited for them to go past me, holding up the traffic behind me, until one very nice dump truck driver stopped for me to go on.
And then there was an uphill left-hand hairpin curve where the street got even narrower, and still these huge trucks coming. I kept looking for the little camera repair shop but all I saw were houses and convenience stores clinging to the side of the hill. And then suddenly the road got wider but it had changed its name to not the road I wanted. I had to keep going and going and finally found the DMV to turn around at.
On the way back down the road I didn't see as many trucks, but I also didn't see the camera shop. By then I figured I'd seen plenty of Morgantown and just wanted to get back to the interstate (you can see how WV's narrow roads are changing my interstate prejudice).
Don Knotts (Barney Fife) grew up in Morgantown and graduated from WVU, so it's not a surprise one of the main roads is named for him.
Morgantown is built on the banks of the Monongahela River.
Fairmont
I had several errands planned in Fairmont. First I found a BP gas station selling regular for $2.69, about 10¢ less than I'd been seeing. The young woman inside told me she'd heard the price is going up another 15¢ or 20¢ in the next few days, so I felt lucky.
I found the post office right where I'd expected it and got a package mailed off. The town's parking meters cost a whopping 25¢ for an hour, so I walked the dogs, too.
Fairmont has a Mary Lou Retton Dr. because it turns out she was born here, though she spent much of her growing up in Houston where she was training in gymnastics. I'd always admired her but have learned today that she personally went to Sen. Dianne Feinstein to ask her not to pursue her bill that would help prevent the Larry Nassars of the sports world. A year later she gave an interview saying she'd been lied to about the Larry Nassar situation. Given that Feinstein introduced her bill in response to the numerous accusations against him, and that he pleaded guilty to several counts, it's hard to understand how Retton could have accepted and acted on lies to that extent. But there it is.
I've been having some increasingly severe pains in my right arm and hand and fingers - getting worse over the last 5 or 6 days, and I finally decided maybe I needed one of those support gloves I see people wear for carpal tunnel pain. I found a CVS right where I expected it, and they had quite a selection of these things. One of the clerks urged me to try on the one she uses, which I did, and discovered it did nothing at all for the pain in my fingers and concluded I'd misdiagnosed myself. I'd realized for days I needed some rest, but I already had all these reservations made, and few of the campgrounds had wifi signals so there was no point in staying there for long. I ended up deciding the place I'm heading tonight might be a good place to stay awhile, because they claim to have wifi in their campground. But I still had to get there.
The main reason I was in Fairmont, though, was to get a pepperoni roll from the Country Club Bakery. These are, unsurprisingly, rolls with pepperoni inside , a creation that originated at this bakery for coal miners to take for their lunch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni_roll Considered as one of the definitive West Virginia foods, I figured I needed to try them. I've found them everywhere but have been holding out for the original.
And I discovered that Country Club Bakery is closed on Wednesdays. By this time, I'd had my unsuccessful driving sprint through Morgantown, had been driving all morning either there or on the interstate, and I was tired and hungry. I went across the street to a little strip mall and found a place called Wright Dawgs and decided to go with a hot dog. But once inside I discovered they sell pepperoni rolls too and ordered one. In this place, they're also willing to put a sauce on the bun, which the young woman at the counter urged me to do, so I did. This thing was huge - with a bun the size of 2 very large hot dog buns side by side and 3 sticks of pepperoni inside - and the sauce turned out to be chili, like for a chili dog. Fine by me. It all cost $2.75 and fed me for both lunch and dinner, there was so much of it.
The dogs and I walked around in the grassy verge between the shopping center and the street, and by the end of that walk Dexter was limping. But I didn't worry, figuring he'd just bruised his foot.
Weston
I passed a sign on the highway saying I-79 along here is a high tech corridor. Not quite knowing what that is, I looked it up and learned that 60% of the US population lives within a day's drive of this area, including NYC and Boston and Chicago and Atlanta. I learned that they've set up advanced telecommunications and electrical infrastructure along there to lure in high tech operations. I learned there's a Tech Park along there that's apparently giving away land for building sites for high tech companies. What a contrast to the National Radio Quiet Zone, not too many miles away as the crow flies.
I learned that Weston is the home of the Weston State Hospital, once known as the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. It opened in the mid-1800s, and is now in use only for tours. It's supposedly haunted, go figure.
In town I saw a historical marker about an event during the Civil War the sign calls the Seizure of Weston Bank Funds www.wvculture.org which was an event I'd missed, somehow.
A couple of miles outside town is tonight's campground. Seems to be a nice little place that caters mostly to sport fishermen. I may decide to stay longer here. I need the rest.
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