EXPLORING WEST VIRGINIA FLYING BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS
Do you know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you are traveling and your car goes over a dip in the road? It doesn’t happen too often anymore because of interstate travel, but if you drive over the secondary roads down through the mountains of West Virginia you can still experience it quite often. On the few times that it does happen to me, it brings back memories of being squished in the backseat of some 1950’s vehicle with my other siblings on summer vacation. I can still recall my dad’s amused eyes in the rearview mirror as he gazed back at us as we held our tummies squealing “Ooohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” He would chuckle and say, “Did you lose your stomach back there?”
The vacations that we went on when I was a kid were never to a set “destination” but were more like “road trips” from beginning to end. My mom and dad loved to travel down through the mountains, usually with my aunt and uncle and their two children, and explore the wonders that West Virginia has to offer.
We never ate in restaurants. There were no McDonalds or other fast food restaurants back then so it was more economical with four kids to pack enough food in our trunk and eat all of our meals at a picnic area. There were many small parks dotting the roads back then. Mom used a small propane gas grill to cook the hot stuff like burgers, hotdogs, and…mmmmmmm…. there is nothing like the scent of bacon and eggs frying out in the open air of a foggy morning in the mountains of West Virginia.
We never made reservations to stay anywhere. My dad would just drive until it started to get dark and then we would start looking for a motel or cabin to stay at. The small cabins were always our favorite! It seemed to never fail that the first two or three places we stopped at would have no vacancy and soon my mom would be complaining that dad waited too long to start looking. Eventually we would find a place. In the mornings, dad would wake us up by turning on a radio or TV to listen to the morning news and shout “Time to hit the deck!” (My dad obviously was an ex-Navy man.)
It seems we never got tired of taking these kinds of vacations and we often sat around and reminisced about them.
In the fall 1990, still grieving from the loss of my dad and brother, my sisters, Annie and Jean, and I decided to take mom on little weekend vacations together. We had so much fun on the first one to Niagara Falls, Ontario, that we were soon taking them two times a year. In October of 1991, we decided to take one of those fondly remembered road trips down through the mountains. Autumn, as you can imagine, is a breathtaking beautiful time of the year in the mountains when the leaves change color. We planned to stay true to our parents’ way when we were little and “fly by the seat of our pants.” Just travel, stop, do whatever we wanted, make no reservations and get a room when we got tired. The only difference was we decided not to picnic our way because we were too spoiled by the convenience of eating in restaurants.
So merrily we went, the four of us, my sisters and I taking turns driving on all the secondary roads down through the mountains of West Virginia, stopping leisurely to enjoy rustic little fruit stands and antique shops along the mountain roads. We rediscovered Blackwater Falls, Spruce Knob, Seneca Rock, and, finally, by evening reached Cass, West Virginia, where we decided to take a sightseeing train ride up the mountain the next day. Snowshoe Mountain Lodge was the closest accommodations so we drove over there and got a room. After we ate supper, we went to our nice comfortable room to get a good night’s sleep. We enjoyed the room so much that we decided it might be fun to stay at Snowshoe another night but when we asked they didn’t have any vacancies. Which didn’t bother us. We were winging it on this trip anyway. We frittered away most of the day with the train ride up the mountain, looking through the museums and little shops at Cass and in the late afternoon we hit the road again heading south and at dusk casually began looking for a place to stay.
Did I tell you how beautiful the mountains are in the fall? The color of the leaves? The beauty of Blackwater Falls? How the wind on Spruce Knob blows so hard and apparently in one direction because all the branches on the trees point in one direction? How majestic Seneca Rocks look from the little corner souvenir store below? The twisting, winding mountain roads that go up forever and then down forever? How scary it is when you are driving those twisting, winding roads after it gets dark with no street lights?
I cannot remember the exact point in our travels that we learned that it is nearly impossible to find a vacancy at a motel, hotel, cabin or shack in the southern part of West Virginia that time of year. Why? Because it is White Water Rafting season!!!! I do remember that we kept driving south still in hopes of finding a place until we reached Beckley. I remember Beckley because my sister, Jean, who wasn’t driving very fast at the time, literally slid to a stop at a red-light and we joked that it was obviously from coal dust on the road. Finally, someone at one of these motels/hotels suggested to us that we might be able to find something in Charleston, West Virginia. By this time it very dark, very late, all of us were frustrated, tired, and cranky (my mom was complaining that “all three of you are just like your father waiting till the last minute to look for a room!”) and we had no other option but to drive another hour or more over the twisting, winding, scary, dark mountain road north to Charleston with my mom grumbling at us in the backseat where we did indeed find a vacancy at the first hotel we stopped at.
That night did not dampen our spirit for adventure though. Refreshed the next morning, we ate breakfast and then explored the grounds of the Capitol in Charleston then continued our leisurely drive northeast where we drove over the New River Gorge Bridge (almost literally “drove over” the side because my sister, Annie, who was driving wanted to enjoy the scenery too!) and through Hawk’s Nest State Park where we located a little souvenir shop with a backroom that had a mysterious illusion that we were leaning sideways as we walked across the room. From there we finally pointed our vehicle north and arrived back in Wheeling after dark.
While mom was alive we continued to take these little vacations. Something silly and memorable would always happen and we began calling them “adventures” instead of road trips. We enjoyed being together and had such a good time making some very happy memories with mom during her last years on this earth.
My sisters and I still go on at least one adventure a year. It’s not quite the same without mom but we still have a great time together, talking and laughing as we enjoy the journey. There is one very important rule we made years ago while mom was still with us: no more flying by the seat of our pants! We never leave town without making reservations first!!
