New England Trip
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Another travel day, this one almost 400 miles through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia into Pennsylvania. Although there were no really significant mountain passages, we struggled all day with uphill grades where we could not maintain minimum speeds and downhill grades where we had to hold the motorhome back. A big part of driving this rig is managing inertia.
West Virginia is the home of two great whitewater rivers, the New River and the Gauley River. Lots of people come here to raft down the rivers on guided tours. Paul Jennings, we thought about you and your stories about raft trips up here.
We stopped at a visitor center with an overlook of the New River Bridge, advertised as the longest arch bridge in the northern hemisphere. The bridge is a beautiful design that we saw repeated in several smaller spans as we drove on through West Virginia. (The bridge builds up a patina of rust that actually helps protect it from more damaging rust in the structure. It is as tall as the Washington Monument plus twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. Coal mine tunnels had undermined the ground where the base footings were built, so the engineers developed some special concrete footings for the bridge arch.
Steve drove most of the way, but Margaret drove through Pittsburgh, and on the north side we encountered a great deal of road construction with very narrow lanes. Much of the way there was a barrier at the right edge of the road with no shoulder, and a median wall on the left side of the left lane. We had to thread our way through the narrow lanes with big trucks passing. For future runs through big cities, we will use the Internet to try to find road construction advisories and alternate routes.
We bought a Powerball lottery ticket with 7 as the Powerball number -drawing for $61 million to occur tomorrow night. What shall we do with all that money??
We arrived at the Bear Run Campground in Portersville, PA in late afternoon, and will travel to Niagara Falls tomorrow.
Picture of Wicket at the bridge overlook follows:
