The Home Stretch

We’ve decided that we should at least make the effort to get home this evening rather than pulling up 30-60 miles short, but acknowledge that decision will be made for us based on what time we exit the West Virginia mountains and start working our way across the upper plains of Virginia. To be sure, Virginia is also mountainous in the west, but in the north they become more like big hills than mountains and the area along the I-66 corridor isn’t too bad. Also to be sure, we don’t plan on taking I-66 or even being too close to it, as there are better things to see in Virginia than its highways.

We’ll set out from Bridgeport on the dreaded route 50, but we discovered last night, looking at the map, that route 50 necks down to a single-lane, more country-style road right here in Bridgeport after crossing I-79. But we’re also going to navigate ourselves around route 48 later on, which is also listed as Corridor H and looks remarkably like the part of route 50 we didn’t like. One thing we’ve noticed in the past, and recently, is that there are many nice, wide, open double-lane highways running through West Virginia, many honoring a guy named Robert Byrd, but never really going anywhere in particular. We understand the desire and intent of the roads, but we’ve yet to see the growth along them they were designed to bring.

Otherwise, we think we’ve found a nice, quiet route through the mountains and will let you know how that goes.

So we’re off, after changing our oil one more time and will keep you all posted on our progress.