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.