Mountain Driving

So... I am in Ripley, WV right now. I drove a lot today, all on two lane roads that were very twisty and turny. My little eyes are bugging out. Yesterday I went to Jamestown, took the Jamestown ferry across the Chesapeake, and then drove across VA to the Blue Ridge Mountians. I slept in my car there (in a camp ground slash the field behind the little league baseball diamonds). It was pretty good, but very sticky hot. So I cracked the windows for air, but by about 1 am…I was getting wet. It had started raining. I scrambled around, crawling over the driver's seat to turn the car on so I could roll up the windows, but in my haste I hit the panic button on my keys - aptly named since it made me panic. So nice of me to alert everyone in the area that I was there. It rained hard all night with car rattling thunder and lightening. I may have been a tin box in a big grass field during a lightening storm, but at least I was dry.

Needless to say I didn't get much sleep, so I took off before it got light and headed up into the Blue Hills and took a nap at a scenic overlook. The Blue Hills as well as the Shenandoah Valley are really beautiful.




Oh and this is for the folks in Boston…it made me laugh. Boston is a knob, not a mountain or even a hill. Just a knob.


I also picked up a couple of hitchhikers just outside the Shenandoah National Park. They were a couple of college-aged kids back packing the Appalachian trial. They wanted a lift into the nearest town to get blue body paint since the next day was hike naked day. They thought they'd paint themselves blue so as not to scare any kids they came across in the Appalachian towns. Somehow I think two naked bodies painted blue might scare them more, but whatever. Hope they have fun.

I have counted 25 bug bites on my right leg from knee to ankle alone and about 15 per arm. My survival = Benadryl.

Gas update:
Eastern VA - $2. 97
Western VA - $2.91
Eastern WV - $2.76
Western WV - $3.09

And last, the map update: