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Published: December 5th 2007
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Obfuscator writes: We got out the Plaza Hotel in Charleston after a decent continental breakfast and more internet weather and tourism checking. The Plaza Hotel, I might add, was a decent place to stay, but it had some quirks, which might make it sit in the non-recommended category. First, though it had HBO, it also only had 16 channels, about half of which didn't come in clearly, or had nothing to watch. In other words, it was a fairly dull place to spend the night. It was also pretty annoying that unlike every other motel in the country, they didn't provide any sort of cups in the room. You know, those incredibly cheap little plastic cups? Zero.
But I digress. The previous night, I received a little bit of intel from our friend J, who lives in Houston. He informed us that NASA is launching a space shuttle on the 6th of December, and you can get tickets to see it from something like 1.5 miles away. Now, we had been planning on exploring West Virginia for a bit, and then heading gradually through the Carolinas and into the South. But with a shuttle launch at stake, we decided that
West Virginia would simply have to be a casualty, and the Carolinas would either wait, or likewise become casualties.
Of course, we were in West Virginia, so we figured we could at least see a little bit of it before leaving. Unfortunately, the weather system from last night had not fully lifted. It remained very cloudy, although it was at least not rainy. The cold front had slipped in though, and it was COLD. At any rate, we drove the short way to the capitol building in Charleston, and made that our first stop for the day. The capitol itself is a large, pretty building. It's got a shiny gold dome, and monumental-sized hallways on the inside. Apparently in the rotunda, there's normally a massive chandelier, but it was out for restoration when we visited. Both the House and the Senate had smaller, but very lovely chandeliers too, which had already been recently restored. They were extremely sparkly. The chambers were pretty nice, and compared favorably to many of the capitols we've been inside. They had a lot of Dell laptops chained to the desks in the House. There was also a huge statue of Robert Byrd in the
Rotunda.
Outside the Capitol building, they had some really neat statuary, which varied from the sort of typical, but nice, war memorials to WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, to the less typical statues to Civil War soldiers and generals. Interestingly, Stonewall Jackson was from West Virginia, though it wasn't a state when until he was already a confederate. They have a statue of him on their capitol lawn, not terribly far from a statue of Lincoln. They also have a statue dedicated to the mountain men who in the early days of the war, opposed the Confederate troops in the area, and harried them.
West Virginia apparently has a fascinating history, which I am only just now beginning to appreciate. It only became a state during the Civil War, and was more or less carved out of conquered territory of Virginia. That makes it sound though, as if it were an occupied territory, which doesn't seem to tell the whole story. From at least some of what we saw, there seemed to be a strong Unionist movement in the state before the war really started. That's how they were able to raise a force to fight the Confederates
so early on. I suppose that part of the story is also just that since West Virginia is so mountainous, and back then, so frontiersy, that it was mostly made up of poor rural types, who didn't have a vested interest in the South's interests, particularly in slavery. Unfortunately, we didn't get to spend nearly enough time in the state, so I will have to find out more about it sometime in the future.
We drove southeast toward the New River Gorge, which we heard was gorgeous. Har Har Har. It was cloudy, and difficult to get to the New River Gorge. The roads were winding and slow. By the time we got in the right vicinity, we decided that it was going to be too much of a pain to really even get to it, and that we wouldn't really get to see it in a good light anyway, since it was so cloudy, so we decided to keep driving. I should add though, we had passed by portions of the gorge both the day before, on our way toward Charleston, and this day, and it really was lovely. Unfortunately, we didn't really get any pictures of it,
for all the reasons mentioned.
West Virginia in general, was extremely pretty in a rugged mountainous sort of way. Again, due to the weather, none of our pictures can probably do it justice.
We hit major traffic jams in Virginia, but eventually passed through it, and into North Carolina, where we pulled into a camping spot at Stone Mountain State Park. North Carolina has a burning ban in place, so we couldn't have a camp fire. That was not fortunate, since by the time we were cooking dinner, it was probably between 15 and 20 degrees outside. Trying to cook things with a Sterno when it's that cold . . . doesn't work well. We heated our food for about an hour, and it never got to a boil.
Since it was painfully cold, but we had electricity hookups, we sat in the car and played computer games until it got to be bedtime. Very clever of us and our technology, if I do say so myself.
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you sons of bitches
Hey, hows about YOU'RE casualties, eh?! I'm offended - deeply, deeply offended. Furthermore, I challenge ye bothe to a duel, a duel...OF SCIENCE!