West Virginia - Day 11 - Greenbrier and some more back roads

Flatwoods KOA, Sutton
Thursday, 11 April 2019

today's route

Robins in the campground were doing a mating dance.  Very sweet.  Did I mention that I saw a Robin carrying nesting material the other day?

I drove I-64 east almost to the state line, heading to White Sulphur Springs, home of The Greenbrier.  Turns out it's also the birthplace of Katherine Johnson, mathematician extraordinaire, who was featured in the movie "Hidden Figures."

The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs
You might want to take a look at the wikipedia page about this place, because it's hosted many sitting presidents and has some interesting features.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greenbrier  One of those is an underground bunker that was built during the Cold War, in case Congress needed a place to hide in.  The hotel offers tours of the bunker but, sadly for me, they charge $39 for this.  Not that interested.

Unfortunately, my camera was still intermittently taking fuzzy photos, and this was the only view of the front entrance that was more than a blur.  I mainly took this one because of the trees.  Of course there were massive beds of tulips and things all around the grounds.

The main reason I came, though, was because this hotel is supposed to have inspired Rex Stout when he wrote the Nero Wolfe mystery titled Too Many Cooks.  It's one of the few not set in New York City and, if you can get past the racism evident in a book of that era (it was written in the '30s), it's a good mystery.  I didn't see much of anything that reminded me of the book's setting, but as a non-guest walking 2 highly visible dogs, I didn't want to get too far onto the grounds.  Very fancy place.

Across the street at the Amtrack station where we parked, there's a historical marker for Kate's Mountain.  I took a photo of it, which was so fuzzy it was illegible.  I can't find a photo of it online that doesn't have a copyright problem, so I'm attaching a link.   www.hmdb.org/marker

I drove back along the interstate for a ways and, oddly, passed logging trucks going in opposite directions, once even seeing 2 on opposite sides of the road at the same time.

Lots of forsythia - either wild or planted by the highway department, which here is called Division of Highways (they're very straightforward here) - all in full yellow bloom.  Very pretty.

I passed Lewisburg, featured in Budget Travel magazine as the Coolest Small Town in America in 2011.

I turned off the interstate at Sam Black Church, which was of course named for a church.  But when I looked it up I found something very odd.  This link will explain about the only time in history that a ghost helped convict a murderer.   www.roadsideamerica.com/story

From there I picked up Route 60, also called the Midland Trail.  I passed a historical marker about how Gen. Robt. E. Lee had his headquarters near that spot during part of the Civil War.

I stopped for a deer to cross the road.

I passed a sign for the West Virginia State Gospel Singing Convention, held each year in the summer months at Mt. Nebo near Rt. 60.

Rt. 60 is a federal highway, but it's still your standard 2-lane no-shoulder West Virginia byway.  I got to one section that had 2 runaway truck lanes, which gives you an idea of how steep it is.

The rocks along this road were yellow.

Isaiah Morgan Distillery
In a tourist handout I found mention of the Isaiah Morgan Distillery, claiming it's the home of the oldest bourbon produced in WV.  It was on the way, so I decided to stop off for a tour.

It's tiny.  The distillery consists of one L-shaped room that's probably the same square footage as two RVs like mine, placed at right angles.  They keep it padlocked.  Might be a state regulation.

The woman who showed me around said something like here it is, (period).  Since I know zippo about bourbon distilling, I asked a whole slew of questions until she finally asked me if I was going to start doing it myself.  But I just wanted to know what it was about and clearly wasn't going to get any information without asking questions.

They combine seed corn and sugar and water and yeast, and let it ferment for a week.  Then they siphon off the liquid it produces into a distiller (looks just like the moonshine distillers in movies), where they heat it slowly and add water until it produces steam.  They siphon off the condensation, at which point they have pure corn alcohol.  They mix that with distilled water to make it 80 proof, and then they bottle it.

Bourbon is a mixture of corn alcohol, rye alcohol and barley alcohol, and it's aged in white oak barrels.  To be legally called bourbon it has to age at least 2 years.  The bottling has to be done in that tiny room because they can't carry the liquor out of it until it's bottled and sealed with wax.

They have a winery, too - mostly things like peach wine, which they were bottling when I was there.  The woman said they had to dismantle the bottling apparatus and take it into the tiny distilling room when they were going to bottle the bourbon.  Of course, I bought a small bottle, though I don't know what it tastes like - I still had a drive ahead and didn't want to be fooling with bourbon until I got where I was going.

All the people working there were very nice, just not the type to volunteer information, I guess.

This campground is not quite like most KOAs.  For one thing, it's managed by the Days Inn, which it sits behind.  The Days Inn lobby is where I registered for the KOA.  For another thing, part of the campground is down in a bowl, while the rest of it sits in 2 places on an upper ridge.  I'm in one of the upper sections.  But the wifi and the cell phone signals are clear, and that's what I was looking for.