Exploration was our plan for today. We jumped into the truck and initially headed northeast to Lake Summerville, a big gorgeous body of water with dramatic cliffs jutting up from the waterline. Once at the lake, we turned east on WV-39 and plunged into the MonongahelaNational Forest. The road is quite serpentine and climbs over numerous ridges, some over 3,000 feet. It also offers spectacular scenery as it passes through forests, canyons, hollows and a few tiny communities. There are lots of roadside flowers in bloom. The little communities have some funny names like Droop and Smoot. Again, it looks like these places were nice when coal was king but now they are sparsely populated and sort of rotting away. Those folks lucky enough to have large pastures at the bottoms of some of the canyons have beautiful places with square miles of bright green pastures and substantial livestock herds. Those living in the tiny ravines above them are mostly living in substandard housing but they do get to pee into the streams.
Near the town of Mill Point, we turned south on WV-219. We soon came across the childhood home of Pearl S. Buck out in the middle of a fine pasture. After some snooping around there, we continued south on WV-219 headed for White Sulphur Springs, home of the Greenbrier Resort. The Greenbrier is a venerable old hotel that is gigantic in stature. It offers resort vacations to folks who never want to leave the resort other than to golf on their nearby course. It is allegedly quite elegant but we didn’t walk around inside because mere tourist parking is almost in the next state. Back in the Eisenhower administration, they made a tremendous bomb shelter beneath the hotel with the intent of putting all the plainly important government officials safely underground while us ordinary peons could remain outdoors to enjoy the benefits of their failed policies and subsequent nuclear annihilation. It was only when they realized the travel time from D.C. to the Greenbrier exceeded the flight time of the incoming Russian ICBMs and all would be cooked except those actually at the hotel when the sirens started.
In White Sulphur Springs we were just across the border from Virginia but we needed to go west so we got on old US-60 which is another very scenic road but it is very turn happy and there are almost no sections where one would actually go straight ahead. Maximum speed for first timers like us was about 35 miles per hour and there were long, serpentine, difficult sections with much lower speeds. We ultimately made it home late in the day having traveled only about 140 miles but being stoked on the fantastic scenery for about 7 hours.
We got a few pictures. Click the asterisk to see them *