We left the beautiful Stonewall Jackson State Park today and got back onto WV roads heading southwest. It was quite mountainous and the road bucked and dove, twisted and turned but still we continued. There does not seem to be any level or straight sections of road in this part of West Virginia. After leaving the interstate, the roads got even screwier.
A couple hours, dozens of ascents and descents and about a million turns later, we pulled off the road right after crossing the New River Gorge Bridge near Fayetteville. Once a year, they close the bridge and turn it over to BASE jumpers for some hopefully proper landings after some suicidal jumps off this lofty structure.
We pulled into an RV park called Rifrafters which has very few spaces, lots of mud and difficult trailer access but, after considerable jockeying around, we got our giant trailer into one of their substandardly sized RV spots. There were a couple thunderstorms that blasted through here today and stepping off the gravel of the RV space onto the adjacent saturated soil can be quite treacherous. I hope when the time comes in a few days that we can get out of here without doing a bog run.

Since we are only scheduled to stay here near Roanoke, WV, for 48 hours, we decided to go into the nearby town of Weston. Due to the local terrain, Weston is built in a skinny hollow in the hills. The boom-and-bust economies of timber, then coal and now pipelines over the last two centuries has been tough on the people here. There are some beautiful buildings in and near town but they are getting run down. It is plainly evident that whatever happened here happened in the past and almost everybody has left.
However, Weston does have a couple of neat features. For many years it was the home of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum that, despite its horror-inducing name, is an architectural masterpiece. There must have been a lot of lunatics in West Virginia because the place is massive and there are bars on almost every window. The main building was the largest cut stone building in the world when it was built and for many years after. Another of Weston’s features is it is the home of the Museum of American Glass. This museum holds extensive collections of all things glass, from mere fruit jars to magnificent glass sculpture and blown glass art. We met a docent named Gunther who explained where stuff was and then cut us loose for a bit of ogling. All of the glass in the museum was made by American manufacturers and artists and the collection is stunning. There is a magnificent all-glass doll house with all glass interior furnishings. All the doors are operable. The tiny interior furnishings are very snazzy and I would be delighted to have furniture that looks like it in my house, only bigger and not made of glass.
Before leaving town, we stopped at a fantastic restaurant named the Hickory House where I had maybe the best serving of baby back ribs I have ever been lucky enough to find. I ordered half a rack but when it came, the waitress noticed it was actually a full rack but, since the cook was in error, she only charged us for half a rack. Quite a bit of the ribs went home with us for future consumption and delight. Half a rack with three sides was $18. Peggy got a pulled pork sandwich with two sides that had a pile of meat on the bun that precluded eating with only two hands and minimal spillage. It was $12. The waitress also brought us some free pickles made on site that were great and that is coming from a guy who doesn’t normally eat pickles. I think the last time I ate one intentionally, prior to today, was in 1960.
Check the pictures. Click the asterisk *

Today we were back on the road, continuing our westward trek. We started this morning in Grantsville at what is probably the weirdest RV park we have ever stayed in. There were probably 100 trailers there but only two people besides us were seen. We jumped onto westbound I-68 and immediately encountered the up and down required to cross the multiple mountain ridges of western Maryland and eastern West Virginia. One minute we would be at 800 foot elevation, quickly climb to 2000+/- foot elevation only to dive down to 800 feet just a few miles down the road. This lumpy program continued until we made it to Morgantown, West Virginia. In Morgantown, we turned southwest on I-79 and started traveling parallel to the ridges and the road configuration turned from up-and-down to back-and-forth. West Virginia is quite mountainous.
Normally we prefer to use old federal and state highways to get from place to place, shunning interstate highways to the greatest extent possible. However, here in West Virginia, using rural highways is not really practical for us due to their circuitous nature and lousy mapping that does not distinguish between paved and dirt roads. We may have a load of time to travel but we don’t have enough to travel on rural roads in this part of America. We have been gazing at maps to find good back road access to the places we want to go and the only thing we really found out is that West Virginia has a very strange shape. To see the shape, close your right hand into a fist with the fingers toward you. Now extend your middle finger. Now extend your thumb. That looks just like the shape of WV.
Somewhere below the life line, we pulled off near Roanoke. There is a Roanoke in Virginia next door but it definitely is not the same place. We drove into the Stonewall Jackson State Park which is actually more like a resort. There is a very nice hotel, a large and gorgeous lake, a big store, a campground with full hookups and gorgeous surrounding scenery. It is by far the most expensive state park in which we have stayed but we don’t anticipate being here more than a couple days so we’ll make it without going bankrupt.

The National Pike was our destination for today. The section we covered was only about 30 miles long in western Maryland but the original road started over by D.C. and ran to nearly St. Louis. It was built as a toll road intended to make it easier for mid-18th century travelers to get from the east coast to the American frontier. In current times, it is shown as US-40 and it is a skinny, two-lane blacktop road running through spectacular scenery and historic towns.
Going east from Grantsville, the first town we encountered was Frostburg, a particularly scenic little town with beautiful old houses and a National Pike toll house that remains from the old days. There is a schedule of tolls listed on the outside of the toll house indicating how many pennies it would cost to go a certain number of miles based on the type of livestock, wagons, oxen, or carriages using the road. A rich person’s carriage with four horses cost more than a peon leading a horse, for instance.
US-40, at least around here, is a very curvaceous road with considerable climbing and descending between small towns. Sometimes the road is atop ridges with fine views and sometimes the road runs alongside creeks or rivers through canyons with steep rock cliffs on each side. It is quite pretty. On our way back east from Frostburg and Cumberland, we took some side roads and found ourselves going to places unintended. We did find a working strip mine and it is pretty plain why folks do not want to live near them. It was a tremendous gouge into the earth and there were massive spoils piles of different colors and materials spread over maybe 1000 acres. The water at the bottom of the excavation looked funny. There were gigantic mining machines belching exhaust and making a tremendous racket as they bustled about getting to the coal.
We left the strip mine and headed back home but we made a side trip to downtown Grantsville which is a tiny burg with a old National Pike masonry bridge that was built by a distant ancestor of the Schriver family. It is a beautiful structure and it was the longest span bridge (80 feet) in the country at the time it was built.
We cut our tour off early today so we could do a little prep for departure tomorrow from this part of the world. We will continue mostly west in the morning.
To see today’s pictures, click the asterisk *

We awoke in our strange RV park in Grantsville, MD, this morning without any really weird stuff happening last night. There is a goon right up our gravel road proudly flying his Confederate flags and there were many denizens skulking about the park in gas-powered golf carts and Rhinos but no harm came to us.
We headed back west on I-64 to Cumberland, a gorgeous city with screwy streets, many old historic buildings and a whole fleet of churches, all built on the steep gorge walls of the Potomac River. Cumberland was the westernmost point of the old C&O Canal, a water-filled ditch capable of carrying canal boats from the Delaware River to here. For some reason, C&O, which stands for Chesapeake and Ohio, does not originate at the Chesapeake anything and it never goes to Ohio. It should probably be called the D&M but who am I to suggest the name should describe the object. The canal was built by unskilled labor with picks and shovels and, after passing 72 locks, it rises to a top elevation of 605 feet from sea level at the Delaware River.
After stopping at a place called the Crabby Pig (good food, good prices) this morning in Cumberland, we walked a short distance to the Visitor Information Office and found lots of maps, displays and a volunteer that whose gender was unidentifiable but who was very informative. The weather has returned to miserable temperatures and soul-sucking humidity so we shot through unshaded areas pretty quickly.
We went exploring on the sidehills of Cumberland and found an amazing variety of really gorgeous old buildings. Americans have been living here in substantial numbers since the early 1700s and many of the original buildings remain, including George Washington’s headquarters used during the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Cumberland has been a transportation hub for 300 years where roads, the C&O Canal, railroads and the Potomac River all come together in one community.
After considerable architecture ogling, we drove down MD-51 which runs parallel to the C&O Canal for about 30 miles to the Paw Paw Tunnel where picks and shovels and some black powder blasted a tunnel 3000 feet through a mountain to save building about 7 miles of canal and locks. When we tried to close the loop and return to Cumberland, however, we found many roads clearly shown on the maps we got at the Cumberland visitor center that did not really exist or, if they existed, were little gravel tracks where we could almost hear Dueling Banjos and folks asking us to squeal like a pig. We begged off on the shaky roads and drove almost to Virginia to get out of there. On the way home, we ran into a thunderstorm that started with a little lightning but soon blossomed into a torrential downpour that, fortunately, ended not too long after flooding the road surface and then disappearing.
To see the pix, click the asterisk *

Today was a travel day. We left Gettysburg Farm TT near East Berlin, PA, and headed west on skinny rural highways for about an hour before running into I-81 where we turned south for a bit. After a short drive on I-81 we turned west and followed the Mason – Dixon line on I-64, an ancient freeway with world-class paving defects sufficient to cause inadvertent lane changes. We wandered into Maryland as we continued our westward trek and soon ran into some mountainous terrain such that it seemed we were almost always turning, ascending and descending. There were few straight, level sections.
As we have traveled this year, we have run into many things on the east side of the Mississippi River with the named of Cumberland. Where Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky come together we visited the Cumberland Gap NHP. In eastern Tennessee we crossed the Cumberland Plateau. Today we drove through a city in far western Maryland called Cumberland. They do not seem to have any relation but they are all scenic. Cumberland, MD, is a gorgeous community built in some terribly steep valleys with an abundance of historical and highly snazzy buildings. We will go back and visit but today we continued on to Grantsville, about 20 miles short of West Virginia.
We pulled off I-64 and headed to a place called Little Meadows RV Park. It is a strange park. First, they only take cash. There is absolutely no wifi or sewer hookups. Even electrical and water hookup was challenging because the place is not so much an RV park but actually a place where many folks have pulled in their trailers and built yards and sheds around them. The folks across the street from us could not pull their trailer out of the park without substantial demolition of the shed their trailer is parked under, their gardens, their lighting arrays, retaining walls of rubble and myriad other alleged improvements. The RV campground is on the opposite side of a 100 acre pond from the office and concealed in a thick grove of hardwood trees. We initially thought it was too dirtbag to stay but we found a smidgen of adventurousness and pulled into a campsite after slithering down the squirrelly gravel roads lined with trees. There is no satellite reception because, due to the trees, we cannot really see the sky.
We’ll give it a try because there is absolutely no other place to go in this part of the world, barring a WalMart parking lot about 50 miles away.
We took a few pictures on the road. See them by clicking the asterisk *

We stayed busy today but didn’t see much. We made reservations in West Virginia for our upcoming travels and that turned out to be more difficult than we expected. In most states, there are few problems finding an RV park near where we want to go. However, in West Virginia, there are few parks and even fewer in locales we wish to visit. Even in the state capital, Charleston, there is only one park and it is a state park with no sites that will accommodate our fifth wheel. We spent a good deal of time yesterday and the entire morning today getting three reservations. We will be moving through WV at considerable speed because we just could not find enough places to stay.
We bought liquor in York. We fueled the truck. We stopped at a vegetable stand and Peggy was all grins. I dumped the tanks. We will leave Pennsylvania tomorrow and continue our trek toward the west coast.

A little historical journey was our task for today. We left our camping spot at Gettysburg Farm Thousand Trails, which is actually in East Berlin that is nowhere near the town of Gettysburg, and headed southwest to the real Gettysburg. Gettysburg is a gorgeous community with loads of old historical buildings. New buildings around here would be those built after 1900.
But back in July, 1863, a month after Robert E. Lee had a dramatic victory at Chancellorsville, he had marched his Army of Northern Virginia through the Blue Ridge and then northward across Maryland and Pennsylvania, coming to rest near Gettysburg. The Union Army was in hot pursuit and on July 2, the two massive armies engaged at Gettysburg. The battlefield was massive – part of the town of Gettysburg was within the Confederate stronghold. More troops from both sides poured into the area while the fighting was going on. The Confederate Army took up positions on Seminary Ridge and the Union Army on Cemetery Ridge, about a mile away.
On July 3, the day started with both sides opening up with a two-hour bombardment of the other’s positions but nobody yielded. Then 12,000 Confederate soldiers advanced across flat, open ground in the attack known as “Pickett’s Charge” and Lee’s army lost 5,000 men in one hour. There were other skirmishes at Little Round Top, The Angle, The Peach Orchard, Warfield Ridge, The Wheatfield and Plum Run that resulted in a total of 55,000 casualties. More men fell at Gettysburg during the battle than any other battle on American soil either before or since.
The battle occurred on absolutely beautiful Pennsylvania farmland and, now that the blood and body parts are gone, the area is again gorgeous. There are many monuments within the park with some terrific statues of fighting men and dignified looking gentlemen although I imagine they did not look so spiffy back in July 1863. There is a great auto tour through Gettysburg National Military Park which we drove with signs marking the locations of units, furthest lines of advance, places of horrible, lingering deaths for the wounded and little signs to keep you on the right roads. It was very warm today and I imagine the weather was not too different back in 1863. Just keeping water flowing to the fighters must have been a nightmare because, in this gently rolling land, there is no place to hide from sharpshooters. Except on the ridges, there is little shade.
There must have been some kind of biker event in the town because there were thousands of Harley riders here today. Harleys are made in York, about an hour away. Surprisingly, almost all of the bikers, including those with chubby women on the back, were quite rotund and back tires got a workout.
There’s some pix. Click the asterisk at the end of this sentence to see them *

We awoke with big plans to go off exploring but the plans sort of went south. We took leisurely showers. We went over to Shari’s trailer next door and hobnobbed with her while playing with her big, happy brown Lab, Gus. I dumped the tanks and caught up on my blog stuff because the wifi here does work although it could not be described as fast. We had cocktails. This traveling stuff is fun.

Today we took a spin on back roads south of our campground in a search for more old, architecturally stunning buildings and we were amply rewarded. The number of magnificent old buildings in this part of Pennsylvania is staggering and little searching is required to find treasures.
On the way, Peggy found a place called the Meadows, housed in a building that looked like a 1950s drive-in. They served frozen custard, something those of us in the west don’t see much of, and frozen yogurt and something called Italian Ices. Peggy got a medium frozen custard which turned out to be three generous scoops on a sugar cone. I can’t imagine what a large must look like. I had a chocolate shake and I do not know whether they used yogurt or custard but it was very tasty.
We continued into Abbottstown, another old Pennsylvania town with magnificent old buildings. They must have had a couple generations of superb architects around here and they left a wonderful legacy.
We made an effort to get onto single lane back roads and we ended up spotting many terrific houses and farms. Check out the blog pictures from July 6th, 7th and 9th to get an idea how many gorgeous places there are here.
We got a few pictures. To see them click the asterisk at the end of this line *