We woke up this morning knowing it was a travel day. We did not have a very satisfying experience the last time we had a travel day 3 days ago because of the hellish Ohio rural roads and potholed major roads.
Today was the complete opposite. We left the campground at Kimbolton and the first 10 miles of road was twisted and hilly but we soon got onto I-77 and had smooth sailing all the way into West Virginia. I expected WV roads to be worse than Ohio’s but we were pleasantly surprised to find the roads we travelled in WV to be very well maintained and wide enough for even a clod like me to drive without apprehension. We zipped through WV until we turned west on US Hwy 50 which is a very good two-lane highway. We crossed back over the Ohio River and ultimately merged onto US Hwy 7 that took us to Racine. There was one part of Hwy 7 that was a bit slow because the DOT had a contractor out in the road painting a fog line along the right edge of the southbound side. Passing was verboten so we moseyed along at 1 or 2 miles per hour for a while until either they ran out of paint or road and moved out of our way. We continued on 7 a bit more and finally turned onto Hwy 33 for a mile or two before doubling back again on the road to our campground. We found it within a half a mile of where the Garmin said it would be and we checked in. It is very hot here so again we set up, turned on the A/C and popped into the Invader to cool off and create a shopping list.
The drive today was very nice with great roads and terrific rural scenery. Even the Ohio River was pretty at the two spots we crossed it. The shore on the Ohio side is filled with big smokestack stuff which is ugly but the rest was okay.
Since we arrived early in the day, we elected to cool off in the Invader and then attempt a shopping trip. We are headed for some state parks next and shopping around state parks is generally either terrible or worse since the store owners know they have a captive audience of suckers unable to shop elsewhere. We have chosen to avoid this shopping trap by remembering to bring everything we need and shopping in advance. We piled back into Charlotte and took off for Pomeroy, Ohio, about 10 minutes down the road. While in Pomeroy, we gazed across the Ohio River and could see a Wal-Mart in Mason, West Virginia, and avoided going to the Powers grocery and getting caught in the shopping trap. While checking out at Wal-Mart, we found that our Visa card had been refused. We had a similar problem in New York a couple weeks ago. We thought the refusal was for the same reason they gave us in NY; we had the audacity to neglect to inform Visa that we were shopping in a state other than our home state of California. At that time, we told Visa we are on the road and to not refuse charges unless they come from Hawaii, the only state we can’t drive to.
Unfortunately, when we called Visa to let them know we were refused again, they told us that some merchant we had used in the past had a breach and we needed to have new cards with new account numbers. Getting mail (or new Visa cards) on the road is tough because we are never in the same place for more than two days and the mails just can’t keep up. We’ll think of something, I hope. At least we have AMEX cards but they are not accepted in a bunch of places. This is a pisser.