Day 100

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Day 100! Woo! It's crazy to think we're in the triple digits of the trip. We got out of our motel a bit late this morning, mainly because they had a good breakfast bar, and we wanted to utilize our internet connection to plan our next move. We wanted to hit West Virginia because there may not be another good opportunity to run through the State, and it's supposed to be pretty. Unfortunately, the forecast we were seeing was calling for rain off and on throughout the day, and solidly overnight. This didn't thrill us much, particularly since West Virginia is best known for its outdoorsiness. At any rate, we determined that we couldn't let inclement weather hold us back, and we began our drive. On our way, we made some calls to various attractions we had seen on the map that we thought might be interesting.

This was one of those times when it hit us just how inconvenient it can be to try to see things during the off-season, and once again, on a Sunday. There's a scenic railway near Cass that looked cool, but they closed in October. There were a couple of battlefields from early in the Civil War that might have been interesting, but the museum aspects of them were closed for the season, and that only left the outdoors portions, which we were less than thrilled to try to see on a cold, rainy day. Near Lewisburg, we stopped to see Lost World Cavern. Although we had just been in a cave the day before, a cave seemed like a decent thing to do on a rainy day, and we were sort of feeling out of options in a state so heavily outdoors oriented. Lost World Cavern proved to be pretty neat. It was much bigger than Dixie Cavern. Rather, I'm not sure it was actually much bigger in terms of distance, but it had more large open rooms to it. This was nice, because it allowed for photographing some of the formations from further away with the tripod. It was also just kind of cool in general, since it gave a grander sense of scale. Incidentally, the cavern was first explored in the 1940s, but apparently the farmer who lived there had been throwing cow carcasses into the hole 12 stories deep for years and years. I guess he just wasn't particularly interested in seeing what was down there, other than cow corpses.

When we were done with Lost World Cavern, we got moving toward the New River Gorge and past that, to Charleston. We figured that we'd at least try to get a little look at the Gorge today, and then motel in the capitol, and come back for the gorge tomorrow. We stopped a bit outside Lewisburg for lunch, which was alright, and then kept driving. We didn't want to take the tollway, but this meant that most of the way to Charleston was slow, winding mountain roads. By the time we got near the New River Gorge, the weather hadn't gotten any better, and it was getting pretty late in the afternoon. We figured that since we were going to be back the next day anyway, we should just keep moving.

We got to Charleston sometime after 5:00 PM. On a Sunday, after 5:00, there's basically nothing open. We went to our hotel, and sat down for the night.

Lessons Learned: Apparently in West Virginia, none of the gas stations have rest rooms. Feel free to use their prized landscapes, since they can't be considerate enough to give you a better place.

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