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 *