John Denver had it right: West Virginia IS almost heaven. 

We’re sitting among beautiful trees, in a campground mostly inhabited by ourselves and a family of six deer, riding beautiful country roads on the motorcycle every day, seeing incredible countryside.  West Virginia is a fine place to be this time of year, and we’re delighted to be here.  The trees are turning golds and reds all around us.  We’ve been told it’s not a good year for fall color, but you sure couldn’t tell it by us!  Every turn in the road offers new beauty, and each day we can see more color than the last.  The best roads go through leafy glades, with lots of swoopy turns and no traffic; West Virginia has tons of them.  We cannot see them all this time through, but we’ll be back next spring.  In May, the rhododendrons are in bloom, and we must be here (to paraphrase, oh dear, is it Rupert Brooke?).  As near as we can tell, the roads in West Virginia are all not only beautiful, but in wonderfully good condition.  Somehow, this small state, which can’t possibly rank high on the overall wealth chart, manages to maintain its roads better than many others.  And the state parks are equally nice.  We’ve been in four of them so far to look around and they have all been exceptional.  Our base of operations for the past six days has been Babcock State Park, near Clifftop, WV.  We are in a lovely meadow surrounded by forest.  It is a section of the park with twelve or so widely spaced open camp sites, our favorite type.  Over the weekend there were two or three others here with us, but since Monday morning, we have had the place to ourselves; oh, and the deer of course. 

We are in the New River Gorge area, which is astounding.  The gorge is deep and remote, and until the bridge was constructed in 1977, life was pretty tough for the natives.  But they are a resilient bunch.  The people in this area have never been used to having much.  In talking to locals, we have learned that not until a railway was built through the gorge in the late 1800s did they have much connection to the outside world.  With the arrival of the train, coal mining became profitable and the area developed.  Then, when the coal played out during the 1920s, the area began to die back again.  Tourism is helping them now, largely due to the building of the bridge, along with high-tech industries.  They say that before the bridge it took 45 minutes to cross the gorge, and now it’s just 45 seconds.  The old bridge at the bottom of the gorge was restored after the new one was built, and the narrow one-way road is still maintained.  It goes down to the bottom of the gorge, 876 feet below the road level of the new bridge, and then back up the other side.  We rode down to see the views.  The river itself is a very active spot for rafting, kayaking and such.  There isn’t a lot of water now, but it is a beautiful river all the same. Interestingly, the New River is actually very old and no one knows how it got its name.  It also is the only river in north America that flows in a northerly direction – go figure.

Our wanderings in this area have taken us to a new town to love:  Lewisburg, West Virginia.  It’s a charming, prosperous town of about 3500 people, contains a community college, a medical school and wonderful homes from several earlier eras.  The town figured in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (battle scars still visible on some buildings).  The folks were charming and helpful in solving a problem for us, and we will visit them again.  The town is in the lovely Greenbrier Valley, which has great bicycling and hiking trails.  Check it out!  Only a few miles from Lewisburg is the better-known White Sulphur Springs, home of the Greenbrier Resort and Country Club.  This is a less interesting town.  The resort itself is world famous and impressive, but seems kind of disconnected from the surrounding town which is rather plain and filled with empty store fronts.

The Appalachian range has been our goal ever since leaving Canada over Labor Day, and it has taken us over a month of travel through seven other states to get to this area.  But that’s been on purpose and we’ve been having a grand time and great adventures.

We came back across into the United States through a small, remote crossing spot in northern Maine.  Earlier in the summer, when we crossed into New Brunswick, it was at the Calais-St. Andrew border, extremely hectic and horribly backed up.  UGLY!!!!!  We didn’t want to repeat that going the other way, as we had been told the crossing often took several hours.  So we found an itty-bitty little crossing and it must have taken us all of 6-7 minutes.  We were the only ones there; the guard was kind of bored and came inside to look around for something to do.  Well, of course he asked us if we had any citrus, and of course I said we did, so I lost all my oranges and grapefruit I’d been saving for a special occasion.  Frump!  But he didn’t want the potatoes:  “they were on last year’s list, but not this year”; you figure it out!

That far north in Maine is almost in Quebec, and most of the locals are bi-lingual.  The towns have French names, and it seems it would be so easy to turn right and head into Quebec, instead of down the Maine coast.  But we had plans that took us south, so south we went.  Northern Maine is exactly as you would expect:  full of trees, lousy roads, few people, and very quiet.  We headed down Highway One (the Eastern Seaboard’s equivalent of our Pacific Coast Highway), which runs all the way down the Eastern coast line.  The Maine coast is lovely as advertised.  Our first couple of days were very foggy and misty; made me think of Morro Bay.  We stopped in Lubec, the easternmost point in the continental United States; a small fishing village except when it’s over-run by tourists, it was quaint and nice.  Further down the coast we spent a few hours in Rockland.  Rockland is the home of the Farnsworth Museum where many paintings by the Wyeth family are located.  You may remember we saw many of their works in Chadd’s Ford Pennsylvania, earlier in the summer.  These guys (3 generations) are incredible artists.  Jamie Wyeth painted a series of works of dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and they are in Rockland.  WOW!  Something else.  Owl’s Head, a nearby town, is home to an excellent collection of antique cars and airplanes and we enjoyed that very much as well.  Maine is super.  We felt very much at home along the coast, and after the obligatory stop at LL Bean in Freeport, we headed inland, toward New Hampshire and Vermont.  Oddly, we went past the towns of Poland, Norway, and Paris, all within an hour; and Mexico was only a fur piece up the road – world travel on the cheap!  Before leaving Maine, we spent the night in the parking lot of the maritime museum in Bath and then spent several hours viewing the museum the following morning.  The site is located on the grounds of a shipyard that was active up into the 1920s building wooden ships.  It was a very nice museum including both indoor exhibit areas and a walking tour of the actual working buildings of the former shipyard.  All very interesting, especially the fact that the largest, and one of the last, ships to be built there was a six masted wooden sailing ship, a freighter, that was 450 feet long.  We’d had no idea such large wooden vessels had been built.  Right next door to the museum is the Bath Iron Works; still very active cranking out steel ships such as destroyers.  Bath is located on the Penobscot River, a wide channel that creates a natural harbor where shipping has always been the main industry.

New Hampshire and Vermont are beautiful, full of grand roads and pretty scenes right out of New England magazines.  Vermont remains the most classically perfect state we’ve seen.  Even the cows all match each other:  they are all Ben-and-Jerry black and white; narry a brown cow to be seen.  We visited a grist mill in Littleton, New Hampshire, that was really cool.  It was recently reconstructed from a mill that went back to  1800 and is operated as a working mill as well as a store and tourist stop.  Bought some stone ground buckwheat pancake mix; pretty yummy stuff.  In Vermont we stopped in So. Royalton for lunch one day; this is a great little town that’s claim to fame is that it is the home of the Vermont School of Law.  So this nothing-little-place is full of students and coffee houses, in addition to the “normal” New England charm.  We liked it a lot.  We went there looking for a “Best Places to Eat” spot that had been mentioned in an article we saw.  Couldn’t find that spot, but had a nice lunch anyway.

Oh yes, and Jeremy has now had his first (and last, if he has anything to say about it) ride on the motorcycle.  He needed to be seen by the vet because of a minor problem, and we didn’t want to move the motorhome.  So we put him in the saddlebag of the bike.  Boy, did he howl!  I kept it partly open as we rode the 10 miles to get to the doc, so he wouldn’t suffocate, and each time I looked back a paw would be sticking out, trying to pry open the top.  It was a lonnnnng 10 miles, I’ll tell you!  And then of course we had to turn around and ride back.  Fortunately, J is a big loving lump of a cat and is blest with a short memory.  The thought of repeating the experience with Agnes is enough to make the blood run cold.  We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

While in Vermont we spent several days in the Champlain Islands.  They are in Lake Champlain (duh!), which is on the Canadian border.  A really pretty area, we were gathering with about 35 other Trek owners for a weekend of fun.  It’s great to get together in a group and swap stories of where you’ve been, what you’ve done to your coach, and eat s’mores around the campfire at night.  We’ve made good friends in this group, and hope to see them often over the years.  If you’re looking for a quiet, out of the way, lovely spot, the Champlain Islands might just be the ticket.  It’s a remote area, and you have to drive to Burlington for decent groceries, but the countryside is great.  Lots of boating and fishing and just being peaceful.  We will go back.

Moving on, we traveled into New York and down the Hudson River as far as West Point, an interesting experience.  Security is tight there, and you no longer can just wander at will, but the museum is excellent and you do go away a believer.  We got lost and went in the wrong entrance; the guards were well armed, but incredibly polite --- and incredibly firm about turning us around…..

One neat story we learned at West Point:  Eisenhower, shortly after World War I, was part of a group taking a convoy of military trucks to the west coast.  The roads around 1920 were really awful, and mostly unpaved.  It was at that point that he formed the kernel of the idea that the United States needed a system of unified, good roads connecting all parts of the country.  That was the idea that ended up being our interstate highway system.  We have mixed feelings about these roads, of course.  They have been the death of many, many small towns, and communities have disappeared that once were vital.  But the road system does work.  You can get from coast to coast on good roads (unless you take the Pennsylvania turnpike!) efficiently.  If you want to.  We prefer to take the secondary roads, moving more slowly, but being able to get a more local taste as we go along.

A sign we spotted on the side of the road: “If you look like your passport photo, you probably need the trip.”

We were only in New York for a few days; we were off to Ohio for a large rally.  We passed through Pennsylvania again (we’re beginning to feel we’ve seen a lot of this state, and that’s just fine with us; Pennsylvania is very pretty and the people are nice; we like the atmosphere here).  Strange sign: “Emlenton, Pennsylvania, home of America’s worst apple pie.”  Makes you want to stop just to find out, which, of course, is the point!

The rally in Van Wert, Ohio was a revelation.  We belong to a group called Escapees, which is a support organization for people who are full-time RVers or spend a lot of time in their coaches and trailers.  The rally offered a zillion  seminars on technical coach stuff, household hints, travel suggestions, insurance information, etc. etc.  We had a great time; well worth the trek across several states to get there.  While at the rally, we ran into some buddies from a campground we had stayed at in Florida last winter.  They live in Indiana, just south of Fort Wayne, and not far from Van Wert.  We accepted their invitation and traveled across the state line to spend a couple of days with them.

These folks have a little piece of paradise.  When you think of the mid-west in the fall, you can think of them.  They live outside town, among huge trees with falling leaves, beside a small creek, in a sprawling home they’ve added onto over the years.  They even have a gazebo with a swing in it!  Talk about a quiet, peaceful setting.  We rode past fields of corn and soybeans, broken up by clumps of trees and barns.  The crops are about to be turned under, and are all gold colored.  We saw combines and harvesters everywhere.  This area has been hit by the drought along with so many other places, and the corn is badly stunted.  It has been a bad year for so many.  But everywhere we see homes preparing for Halloween, even though it’s very early.  The cornstalks and pumpkins and Indian corn are set out in front of houses, and roadside stands are full of stuff to buy.  The only fresh fruit are various kinds of apples.  (And apple pies, and apple butter, and, and, and…..yum!)  for awhile we followed signs down a country road to the “Haunted Trail of Horror” but then we lost the trail.

One afternoon we went to a town (Fairmount, I think), about 40 miles away; they were having a James Dean festival.  It seems this was his home town, before he went off to Hollywood.  How strange that our friends live that close to where he was born, and our home in Paso Robles is about the same distance away from where he died.  The festival included a classic car show, and there were lots of rods and side burns, just as you would see on the Central Coast.  We do have a love affair with that era, we baby-boomers!

The baseball playoffs have begun, leaving Rick in agony most of the time.  The Giants are still alive as of this writing, and he is chewing his nails down to the quick.  Keep you fingers crossed for us, please.  For the first time, we can now listen to the games as we drive along.  We recently installed satellite radio in the coach, and are enjoying it very much.  Mostly, we enjoy the always clear reception of the commercial free music channels, but we also get ESPN, the Weather Channel, and many more news and information stations for when we want them.  The end result is that Rick now tries to drive and listen to hear what Barry Bonds is doing, all at the same time.  The other afternoon he missed two highway turns during a particularly tense time.  He denies that this happened, but I’m the one who was paying attention to the road at the time.  GO YOU GIANTS!

So here we sit in Babcock State Park near Fayetteville, watching the deer, visiting little towns like Sam Black Church and Gauley Bridge, and toasting Robert C. Byrd.  He’s the senator from West Virginia who has pushed so hard to develop tourism in his home state.  We know why he is so loved here and we salute all he has been able to do.  This state needs our tourist dollars, and we’re planning to do our best to help out all we can.  We may stay until the snows fly!  Besides, we want to go back to check out Jack Horner’s Corner, a not-even-wide-spot-in-the-road around one of yesterday’s bends.

Find a country road and enjoy the fall with us.

Love,

Rick and Kathy

See more photos from 2002-2003

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