1600 Miles, 4 States, and 14 Days Later…
by Ricky - June 16th, 2009.Filed under: General, Travel. Tagged as: Back Roads, Driving, West Virginia.
This update is a few days late but the title is still the same. In the course of two weeks I drove through 4 states for a total of 1600 miles on the dot. The previous post has most of the update and then this one is to finalize it and recap (with a few more pictures of course, who really reads now a days anyways).
So yeah, I headed up through wild and wonderful last Friday. For a few years now I have wanted to take the “back” way to Morgantown – a.k.a. the route that involves the least amount of interstate as possible. Back in the day my aunt went to WVU and had no other option than to go through the woods and over the hills, and in true Mountaineer fashion, I followed some of her footsteps. I will confess, for about 30 miles of VA I did travel along I-77… but this was just to go through the tunnel and I have made the trip over that particular mountain many times. Even with this “shortcut”, it took me nearly an hour to get cross the WV border. By now I was on US-219 and never looked back. My initial goal was to go past Green Bank (read previous post below) in route to Elkins for some camping. I must say, that is a massively large radio telescope. Seriously, 100m (330 ft) in diameter!!! Big! Upon arriving in Elkins I turned on my phone to discover that the camping had been canceled. See, going through the parts of WV that I had been in there is no cell coverage, so I just turned off my phone. Apparently I was supposed to be a popular person that day haha. But yea, the camping was canceled due to weather concerns and a breakdown in communication (as in Facebook decided not to send out a butt-load of messages containing all the crucial information… Hence why Facebook will be the end of the world but that will be a different post). Billy still came down – mostly because I was going there no matter what – and he ended up staying through the weekend to get work done. I came on up to Morgantown that night, completing the trip from Wytheville, and thoroughly enjoyed the day.
Something that has been on my mind a lot since returning to Morgantown is how the pace of life here is so much faster than Wytheville and Myrtle/Topsail. It has been making me rethink a lot of basically how I want to live. Do I want to burn the candle from both ends or just one, so to speak. I have to tell you, I am leaning towards the Wytheville way of life. Basically it is having fewer things on my plate but increasing the quality of what is there.
What is on your plate of life? Does it feel too crowded? If it does, think about simplifying things, however that may look.
As promised, here are the pictures!
Ronceverte, WV – The Great Rubber Ducky Race!!!
Coming out of cloud 9
The river at the camping spot
One of those Beautiful Mistakes shots of the river
Old time Americana – The old on top and the new below
Until next time, Ciao! Ciao!

