Bridge Day…but not

October 18, 2025 is bridge day in West Virginia. As James explained yesterday, people go to the New River Gorge Bridge and jump off of it. They also climb down into the gorge. There are vendors and you can walk on this bridge that is typically (every other day of the year) used for driving so no walking. We got up early (again) and got breakfast at the hotel. We got on the road at about 9am. There was a half hour drive to get to the Walmart pretty close to the bridge itself and they have shuttles. We were coming from the south side of route 19. Anywho, we forgot to stop at the bank so when we got to the parking lot we were going to have to turn around and go back about 5 min to the bank and get cash. I had the idea to run into the Walmart and buy something to get cash back and avoid the extra drive time. Coming around the parking lot I saw a coffee stand and noted that for later. Driving around trying to find a place to park we saw the line for the shuttle. It started half way across the Walmart building and across the back of the lot, the around the one side and across part of the building. So overall, at 9:30am the line just to get onto the shuttle was probably an hour wait. They had school buses for transport which was a great idea but only 2 came to this spot. We decided to bail out and do something else. We didn’t want to stand in line for an hour to get there and then have to battle back onto the shuttle to go to our next stop. Still I made James stop for me to get coffee from the stand. It was so sugary and had extra sugar on top but I liked it.

Trying to get on the other side of the bridge was trouble. We took a small tour of Fayetteville, WV without trying. People were parking and walking everywhere. We did see the festivities and a small amount of protesters at the end of the bridge which was cute. I’m not sure why people were protesting base jumping but ain’t my circus, ain’t my monkeys, ya know?

We decided to go to Cranberry Glades Botanical Area on the way to Green Bank. It took an extra 45 min as advertised to get around the closed down 19 bridge but was a nice drive. There are a lot of leaves changing at this point and I think we are seeing more because we are driving north now. The botanical area was not as exciting as I imagined I will admit. I think we were about a week too late to see some pretty colors but it was a half mile stroll on a boardwalk and we managed to find plenty to photograph.

Next stop was the Green Bank Observatory. James would do a better job explaining this but I’ll do my best. Basically, there is a giant (and a few smaller) telescopes that listen to the solar system. Due to this, they have a 10 mile dead zone radius around this location to reduce interference. The goal is to listen to noise coming from outer space, not here on Earth. There was a sign asking you to turn off your phone because they could detect your phone on airplane mode from Saturn with the equipment they use there. On the way there we found a little used book store. It was bigger than I had expected actually and smelled like old books.

There is a little cafe in the observatory and there were these 2 sweet women working in there. One taking the orders and working the small pizza oven while the other woman put the pizzas together and was getting ice cream. The one behind the scenes had a cute purple top on and she was trucking back and forth from a storage room for extra cheese and milk. We ordered a soft pretzel and waited like 20 min for it while sitting in the cafeteria and watching people. Then we went into an area with some fun kids interactive set ups. Of course, there was a stop in the gift shop and we were able to take digital photos on the observation deck. Beyond the observation deck you had to turn off any digital item like phones, digital cameras, step counters, and things like that. Pacemakers were fine though.

You can walk the loop to see the telescopes and they do have a shuttle that will take you around. We did not do the sanctioned tour or the self guided one. Rebels.

From there we found our way toward Elkins - no GPS allowed in that radius either - but the map could still find our location so I was able to tell which way and roads to use. We are staying at the Tygart hotel right in town. It is a really nice place. We are on the fifth floor and I think we are the tallest building in the whole town. It has been a hotel since 1905 under a different name. There is a nice restaurant in the lobby that looked good but we had been in the car all day and didn’t feel like we would fit in there. So, we went to Beanders. We had burgers and some drinks, it was good. There was live music but we sat on the opposite side of the bar and it didn’t bother us. The people weren’t bad or anything, it just feels a little too much like AMT.

Tomorrow we drive home. It should only take about 5 hours. We’ll see if we make any stops along the way.

Exploring New River Gorge

We started day 2 of our West Virginia adventures getting up around 8 or so. We got our free breakfast again before checking out. The hotel was nothing special, but the room was pretty big and was somewhere to sleep and watch the Steelers get beat by a last second field goal. Great. I had planned a route of places to go the night before, waterfalls, abandoned towns, etc. So I plugged the route in and we were on our way.

The first stop was the ghost town of Thurmond. I had been by it once going down the New River, so I couldn’t see much anything, and Kacie had never been there. It was a hike to get there, but we were going that way for our next night’s hotel in Beckley and the rest of the stops on day three were close, so this would be the longest drive of the day. It wasn’t bad and we started getting close around 11. Thurmond is now in New River Gorge National Park, which is the newest national park we have. Which was kind of nice since even the roads that Google said would be gravel and dirt were freshly paved. On the way in we stopped once or twice, the memorable one being a little waterfall called Dunloup Falls. You could see it right from the pull-off on the road, however, Kacie scaled the cliff to get better shots.

The road was nice right up until you approached the bridge over New River that takes you to Thurmond. This is a crazy bridge with two lanes, one for trains and one for cars. So the driving lane isn’t the widest, and it’s pretty much metal grates with some wood planks thrown in for kicks. It can hold a train though, so no big worry there. We crossed over the bridge and turned down to run parallel with the remnants of the town. Coincidentally a freight train was coming through as we pulled up. Kacie wanted to get a picture of the train so I told her to hop out right where we were. She did and just stared at me as I then parked about 10 feet from where I told her to get out. I figured she wouldn’t want to miss it. But it’s a freight train, so it proceeded to pass us by for the next 5 minutes. So we both got pictures and I got some video.

After the train was gone, we could hop over the tracks and explore. The town was big in the coal mining days, but shut down decades ago with most of West Virginia. A lot of people lived there while it was alive and a lot of money was made. It was a big town in it’s day. There was some story about a poker game that lasted a couple days along with others I was never interested in to remember. But if you care, there’s plenty of all that on the internet. Which turns out, a lot of people read. There were vehicles full of old people there as well, wondering around slowly and getting in our pictures. For whatever reason, a lot of them were amazed by the freight train going by, and then slowly disappeared once it was gone. To be fair, there’s not a ton to see here. There is a row of old buildings still there right beside the tracks, a bank, a couple houses, etc. They are kind of cool to see and take some pictures of, but it’s not a place you need to spend a lot of time at. We like that stuff, but the old people walk up and down the row of buildings and leave. Good.

While we were walking back down the row, because we also were walking up and down looking at buildings, another train came by, not as long and full of coal. That’s still a thing, just not nearly as prominent and way more efficient. We got some pictures of the engine on that one. Dad would’ve thought that was cool. There was never really a stop to the influx of old people, so there were still plenty around when we tried to get a better look at the old bridge we came over on. Some old guy had wondered onto it even though it wasn’t really wide enough to talk and drive on, as was to be expected. We watched a few vehicles slowly try to get past him as he got in the way of Kacie’s pictures. He eventually woddled off and I believe she got a few good ones. It was a cool old bridge.

We also saw this cool plane…and a tiny sliver of the moon

The newer train station/gift shop was closed because of the shutdown, I think. I’ll explain that one later. So we had covered what we wanted to there and were ready to move on. I had planned on taking a single lane dirt road to our next stop, a grist mill about 10 miles away. Since it was barely a road up and down a couple mountains, it would still take about an hour to get there. The road was across the tracks on the town side and went straight up a mountain. The thing about it was, there was a sign that said no outlet. Google and by reading google, I was under the impression that not only would that road take us to the mill, but it would then connect to other roads that would take us to our other stops. None of our stops were that close together, so I started to worry that if we did take that road, and something bad had happened to the road that would make us turn around, we would not be able to get to see what we wanted to see. So we looked at google again and found that it would only take an extra 5 minutes or something to go the whole way around to the mill on highways and numbered routes. I guess they figured on the mountain road you’d be doing like 15 mph, where the highways down here are mostly 70. Since we had already done enough off-roading to hold us for a while the day before, and we did want to see the rest of the list, we decided to go the highway route. We didn’t think about it at the time, but this would also drive over the New River Gorge bridge and be able to stop at the overlook. This was significant since Bridge Day was the next day and we would be gone after that. So it all worked out. And showed us how insane Bridge Day would be on Saturday. We’ll still probably try to go, but we’ll gauge what we see then. So we drove over the bridge, which isn’t itself that interesting. You know you’re high up and crossing a bridge, but you can’t really see anything. Just over the bridge is one of the New River Gorge visitor centers. Now I understood that the Thurmond stuff was closed because of the shutdown and it’s a national park, so federal, but so is the New River Gorge stuff, and there were a lot of park rangers working, but maybe because of Bridge Day. I hope they weren’t working for free, but maybe. I believe this one is pretty much just for the bridge and the lookout for it, so it makes sense for the weekend we’re in. There are some cool activities around for the right people. You can walk across the bridge on a walkway underneath it, or walk down to the bottom and look up at it. There are also a few nice lookouts to see the bridge from a little bit further away and take in the size of it. Tomorrow is Bridge Day, and on that one day every year people also jump off of it and repel down it, and you can watch them do it. They also shut the bridge down for six hours and up to 100,000 people wonder around it and buy crap from like 150 different vendors. That’s what wbre might try to go to. We didn’t plan that, or even know it was this weekend, but we’re here. But I digress, Kacie got some cool shots of the bridge from the overlook and we jumped back into the Bronco to go to the mill.

We didn’t look up a lot about the mill, but thought it looked cool. It was only a short drive from the bridge visitor’s center so we got there pretty quickly. It was a cool mill and we wondered around it for a bit getting some pictures. A bunch of people there too. I think a lot of people were around because of Bridge Day, more than a normal October Friday, but maybe not. They are a state park so the shop was open. We each bought a shirt and a sticker. The only money we spent so far other than hotels and food, unusual for us. Unfortunately, neither of us had any internet here, so we took off to our next stop half blind. We knew about where it was, but not 100%.

On the way Kacie did get internet back, we always had GPS, so we knew where we were going. Hemlock Hollow Falls. It was just off some back road wrapping around the east side of the Gorge park. I knew we were close, and we were talking and paying the best of attention, and all of a sudden I hear Kacie say there it is. The pull-off was on the other side of the road and she said this about 25 feet before we passed it. No one was around so I let off the gas and cut the wheel to the left quick. Little did I know the pull-off where I hit it had about a 10 inch drop. The Bronco took it well but it was quite a jolt as I slammed on the brakes into the gravel. We were jostled but both laughing. The waterfall was cool, but down a fairly steep hollow that we didn’t want to climb out of. Kacie still got some cool pictures even though from where we could easily get it was hidden behind trees. This was a quickie so we were ready to take off again. But, West Virginia has worse reception than backwoods Colorado and South Dakota combined. We again at least knew what direction to go, so off we went. (As it turns out Kacie did not get the best pictures…sorry)

And again, we got internet back on the way to Sandstone Falls, the largest waterfall on the New River in WV. This is on the far south end of New River National Park, about an hour away from Beckley. There is a boardwalk that takes you out to the river, just downstream of the falls. This isn’t your typical waterfall, it’s more a collection of falls all across the New River in this spot. As you walk along the boardwalk, there are various places to stop and see the more minor falls on the way to the more central, and impressive, falls. We just went as far as we could on the boardwalk and stopped at these smaller ones on the way back. At the end of the boardwalk there is a viewing platform that gives you a good view, but you can also leave the boardwalk and go right out to the actual river jumping from giant rock to giant rock. It’s a cool thing just to be in the middle of the river looking up at the falls. These falls are big enough that you get the “spray” from them like you see on the big ones. Unfortunately, since it was the end of the day and we were on the east side of the falls looking west, the sun was slamming us right in the face, and it was a crystal clear day down here. So the pictures we got won’t be the best, even though I’m sure Kacie’s pictures will still be nice, I haven’t seen them yet. With my more limited photography skills, mine are mostly blown out. But whatever, it was nice just to be hanging out down there by the river. We hit a couple smaller falls on the way back to the Bronco and started to head to Beckly.

For this third night, I got us in to Comfort Inn. It’s pretty nice. We weren’t looking to be fancy with dinner tonight, we figured tomorrow night could be fancier since we’ll be in a fancier hotel. There is a Wendy’s right beside the hotel, so we walked over there and brought some burgers and chicken nuggets back. Tomorrow the plan is to get up and head to Bridge Day. We’ll see how crazy it is and gauge if we want to go then. I guess you’ll find out tomorrow…

Heading to West Virginia

We have been talking about going to West Virginia for a while now. It isn't too far of a drive and I have heard it is beautiful. So, off we went

We got up and filled the car on Wednesday morning at around 8am (I know, I would have chosen a little later too but we wanted to get moving). We stopped for gas and coffee and I started the drive. James slept on and off for a few hours and switched drivers after we crossed the WV state line. We stopped at the welcome center and picked up some literature. For the scrapbook...but I'm going to read it once I finish this up tonight. James drove the rest of the way here – it took 7 hours of drive time but just about 8 hours for us. We stopped for lunch at a McDonald's for their delicious Coke. Super uneventful drive. It was a sunny beautiful day.

We are moving around a lot during this trip so we are in a few hotels rather than a house like we usually rent. These first 2 nights we are at a Holiday Inn Express in Logan WV. I never thought of myself as stuck up until I went to the Walmart here. I am, my bad.

Our hotel is within a sort of complex that has a Lowes, Walmart, Arbys, movie theater, the EPA, McDonald's, Burger King, and about 7 other businesses. I can't even remember them all. It's like a theme park but James let me know right off the bat we were not to be walking between the buildings. We watched the cars for 5 min and decided we would not make it.

After checking into the hotel we grabbed Luna (they name their luggage carts) and brought our bags up to our double queen suite. It is a very big room for a hotel. It is a nice place and the 2 women I have met at the front desk so far as just the nicest people. The woman I talked to today complimented me so many times in about 2 minutes I didn't know what to do with myself. She really likes my bangs. Also, I was surprised at the thick southern accents by the locals. I didn't think we were deep enough in the south for that but we are in the Appalachian Mountains.

Anyway, as I mentioned, we are in Logan which is south west WV. We are not very far from Kentucky here actually. We stared the furthest away and will work our way back toward PA from here. This is where you go to play around on the Hatfield McCoy trails. We rented a Polaris Expedition this time...we're so boujee. We rented from a Polaris outfitter called Local Goat about 30 min away from our hotel.

For dinner we went back out to a place a few min away called Chirico's. It was Italian food and we got a calzone to split. We weren't super hungry after a day of just sitting in the car. They brought out this very good bread to start out and both thought about getting pasta because it had to be good but just weren't hungry enough for that. We will get up early again tomorrow to go pick up the machine and get on the trails!

Thursday we got up at 7am(ish) and got some free breakfast in the hotel before heading out. We had stopped at the Walmart yesterday to pick up some trail snacks to take along with us but we over estimated our hunger level and brought most of it back with us. The water was the best investment there.

James drove us the half hour to the Goat outfitter. Again, the guy there was very friendly. He gave us a waiver and a quick overview of the buttons but this isn't our first rodeo so we were ready to get moving pretty quickly. There was a map equipped on the ATV but James also had downloaded the trail map on his phone and we could follow along with where we were with his GPS.

He started us out on the road. We went into a trailer park first but figured it out. You can drive on the roads here so we went up a little hill and found the trail head. All of the trails are numbered here and marked at each crossroads which was really nice. I don't know that anywhere else we have gone has been so well marked.

I was very surprised but right off the bat we found puddles to run through. It was a shady trail we went down first and there were actually a lot of wet areas. Once we got a little further away it stared getting dusty which is what I expected. It has been so dry at home I didn't expect to find any water. I guess they are doing better than we are with the rain.

We swapped off an on through the day. We had the rental from 9a-5p and ended up staying out until about 3pm. We went a good distance – the blue lines are indicating where we drove.

We started to head back and decided to take 1 more loop back where we found those puddles. There was some sort of large truck and trailer going down the trail we needed so we were killing some time. Well I was driving this time and smashed another puddle. It's just too fun to ignore the gas peddle in the middle of a big muddy mess. So, we were soaked just in time to go back, get gas, and wash the car off. They have this little wash station like a car wash right outside the outfitters place to clean the ATVs off after the day. What a great idea. We had to spray off the inside of the doors too because we didn't close the windows before epicly splashing into the water.

We came back and cleaned up before heading back to the same restaurant as last night. We decided we had to try the pasta. I had chicken and broccoli alfredo, James had the same sans broccoli. It was very good. This time they brought us some olive oil and spices with the bread. It was very good – and cost $2 – so I'm glad it was good.

It was pretty early when we got back to the room but man I'm tired. We found out that Bridge day is this Saturday so when in Rome. We need to re-plan our next 2 days so we can see what all the hype is about. And reroute to get from our Beckley hotel to our Elkins hotel. Tomorrow the plan is to drive to Beckley and beyond to chase some waterfalls.