Tuesday, 2 April 2019
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| today's route |
Most of their young trees and bushes were surrounded by what I'm guessing is deer protection, which means what the dogs reacted to during our early walk was likely a deer.
The whole drive was on interstates - I-77N to Charleston, then I-64W to Milton, east of Huntington, on the WV/OH border. I-77 is a toll road and it's possible to drive quite a way on it without paying a toll. All West Virginia's done is stick 3 toll booths at 25-mile intervals along the road, and if you come to one while you're driving, you pay a toll. It's $4.00 for a car, $5.00 for my RV. You don't get a ticket and pay by the mile, you don't go through a toll booth when you exit. You just pay if you come across a toll booth on the road. Novel experience.
At one of the booths I got behind a tractor-trailer and figured he'd have an E-Z Pass transponder and would slide on through. Instead, he took enough time to obviously be paying a toll (I couldn't see what he was doing but guessed). So when it was my turn, I said to the man in the booth that I'd have expected all semis to have transponders. He said no, a lot of them don't want to be tracked, and these days the transponders track everywhere they go. Very surprising to me. All of it.
I passed an exit labeled Ski Resort, and looked it up. Winterplace Ski Resort is quite near the highway and is a 3,600' mountain with a vertical drop of 603'. The pictures looked nice. But they said they had zero snow pack right now. Spring came up there too.
But for a while as I was coming along the road I wasn't seeing many signs at all of spring. I was surrounded by hills and mountains for the whole I-77 part of the drive; they were covered with trees, almost all of which were bare, and the hills looked like a wire bristle brush. Just an occasional evergreen of some sort here and there.
But as I got down to lower elevations I started seeing spring everywhere. The bushes are all getting green leaves, and even some of the shorter trees are. I'm seeing what I think are Red Bud trees - sort of magenta, and maybe some Red Oak - more red than the Red Buds.
In Beckley I passed a sign for Robert C. Byrd Dr. I'm betting there'll be lots of Byrd designations around the state. He served in Congress for West Virginia and still holds the record as longest serving senator in Congressional history - 51 years. And he had a 97% attendance record. His background was what you might call checkered, and I'm attaching a link if you're interested. https://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-byrd-579660
It seems in West Virginia they like to honor people by naming bridges on their behalf. One was a little different though: the Rosie the Riveter Memorial Bridge. Apparently, there were a lot of Rosies in West Virginia, which makes sense when you think of what this state must have produced for the war effort. The Netherlands Embassy sent tulip bulbs for the dedication, in continuing remembrance of the US dropping food supplies to the Netherlands, when it was blockaded during WWII.
Looking all this up I learned about an organization some of the Rosies have founded called "Thanks! Plain and Simple." Interesting. http://www.thanksplainandsimple.org/
This campground is a standard KOA, but it's not exactly a wilderness experience: it backs right up to I-64. Highway noises all night. Although I'm enough of a city girl to think of it as white noise, usually. The contrast with last night is stunning, though, because it was seriously quiet at that state campground and very dark. Here there are plenty of lights. Quite the change.
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