Chapter 8: Back Home in Middle America
September 28 - October 13, 1997
9/28 We got an early start and drove from Killarney north to Sudbury and then west to cross the border at Sault St. Marie, then down through the Upper Peninsula to Mackinac. The border crossing was uneventful. This is a very pleasant and varied drive - views of small lakes, deep forest, and reasonably good roads. We found Castle Rock Mackinac Trail Campark just before dark. The office was closed, but they had taped a marked-up campground map to the door, showing the location of each empty campsite. Their full-service sites were nearly all taken, but we found a convenient pull-through and soon had the trailer unhooked and plugged in, and then headed out to find a good restaurant to get a serious food fix, after living on mostly dehydrated glop for the last six days.
9/29 Most of the day was spent airing and drying our camping gear, then getting it repacked in the storage crates. Dave badly needed a haircut, but the barbershops all were closed on Monday. We did find a propane supplier and filled an empty tank.
9/30 Dave went into town to get a haircut while Helen puttered around the trailer and did some sewing. After lunch, we hooked up and headed across the Mackinac Bridge. As we approached the bridge, signs warned of high winds, and electronic signs indicated a truck and RV speed limit of 15 mph. So the first part of the drive onto the bridge was with white knuckles. In fact, there was no problem. We felt no wind effects on our rig, and gradually pushed up the speed. The drive down through Michigan, on deteriorating expressway, was uneventful. We drove into The Flats Condominium Campground in late afternoon. We chose this as the closest campground to Sanford, MI, where we had arranged to spend the evening with Helen's nephew Todd. The campground is the first condominium we've seen - the campsites are owned individually (some with elaborate permanent improvements), and only a couple of full-service sites were unoccupied and available for transients. It proved to be a pleasant place to stay off-season, since relatively few of the RV's were currently occupied and it was very quiet and peaceful. We had a long pleasant evening with Todd and his wife Shari.
10/1 Another relative short and routine drive from Sanford down to Holly State Recreation Area, near Flint MI, where Helen visited her brother Ron.
10//2 We drove west and south across Michigan on narrow state highways, through small towns that seem to have changed very little in the 40 years since we lived in this area, arriving in Coldwater about sundown to visit Helen's brother and sister-in-law Dick and Mary. We spent a pleasant three days camped in their driveway, visiting and sightseeing around the area. Their beautifully manicured lawn is a tiny enclave in the midst of a zillion acres of corn and soybeans. One day was spent in South Bend Indiana, where there is a very large and well-organized genealogical collection at the public library. Dave found some more clues to his ancestry.
10/5 Drove from Dick's. Stopped at Toledo Museum of Art. A nice collection of Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, Cropsey, Kensett, etc. One Bierstadt - El Capitan at Yosemite. One Remington painting. The European collection had nice things too - and was well balanced. Everything was well hung and in good condition. They had a Wendell Castle grand piano - one of several quite different cabinets he has done for Steinway concert grands. Displays of furniture, silverware, dishes, etc, were mixed in with the paintings in an interesting way, and they had some beautiful things. I found a 17th century room from a Swiss castle to be very interesting.
Arrived at Berkshire Campground after dark. One of the few times we've pulled in after dark, without reservations, with the office closed, and had to hunt up a campsite on our own. No real problem, but I'd certainly rather stop earlier.
10/6 At Berkshire Campground, near Columbus. Did odd jobs around the trailer most of the day - Helen did laundry. Picked up Helen's sister Joy, brother-in-law Bob and their son Andy for dinner about 6 p.m. Afterward, Bob went off to a meeting and we spent the evening talking to Joy and demonstrating the GPS and Map'n'Go
10/7 Helen helped Joy plant perennials. Dave did some shopping, including paint and caulk, and then scraped, caulked, and painted a section of Joy's patio ceiling which had been water-damaged from an earlier roof leak.
10/8 House cleaning and organizing day - we've generated a lot of clutter in the last few weeks. Dave also did a few small repair tasks that have accumulated. The campground store had a fairly large but disorganized collection of RV repair parts, some of it quite old. Dave found a side marker light fixture that was an exact replacement for our damaged one, and did the replacement task. In the evening, Joy, Bob, and Andy came to see the trailer and have dinner with us.
10/9 We've sort of decided to go east - the weather is beautiful and warm (it's been in the low 80's for several days), and the leaves still haven't reached peak color here, so there's little incentive to head south. About 60 miles east of Columbus, we stopped in Zanesville OH. We skipped the Zane Gray Museum, but stopped in the Zanesville Art Museum to see their Bierstadt. Fortunately, the place was nearly empty, since with our trailer, we filled about half of their parking lot. The Bierstadt turned out to be a fairly small but nice painting of Old Faithful at Yellowstone. There were a few other paintings of interest, and some nice glasswork. Much of the good art seemed to have been acquired from local families. Some well-to-do ancestor would buy one or two good paintings, from contemporary, not-yet-famous artists, presumably at modest prices. These were handed down through several generations in the family, and eventually donated to the local museum.
Zanesville at one time had a large glass factory - mostly utilitarian bottles but some art glass too. The centerpiece of the lobby was a six foot high fired clay urn, weighing 1600 pounds, which had been made in Zanesville as an industrial container for acid. It appeared to hold several hundred gallons. The description of how it was made was quite interesting.
Just before dark, and 15 miles short of Charleston WV, we drove up a tiny, winding country road through the hills to Rippling Waters Campground, which turned out to be a pleasant, well-maintained place owned and operated by the Church of God. The campground portion is quite large, with a large number of permanently occupied sites. One section of transient sites has concrete parking pads and full hookups. We didn't intend to unhook, and chose a section containing about 10 long pull-through sites in a pleasant little isolated hollow, with water and 30-amp electric, but no sewer. As we were registering, the lady in the office brought out her binoculars so we could get a good look at two half-grown fawns lying in the grass about 200 yards away. A several-acre pond in the middle of the park contained a flock of ducks and several huge white geese. We had just time to go for a walk before dark, discovering a tiny one-family cemetery in the woods
10/10 It rained during the night, and began clearing in mid-morning. Somebody plans the weather well in this area. Decision time! We spent most of the morning looking at maps and descriptions of tourist attractions, and finally decided to do a meandering loop through West Virginia and North Carolina. We decided to skip Charleston, since the only major attraction seemed to be the capitol building itself. Just beyond Charleston we stopped at Terre Salis, a commercial nursery and garden center with an interesting collection of unusual plants and trees and a nice display garden. Again, we filled a large section of their parking lot, and had to move some potted trees in order to complete our turn when leaving.
We drove highway 60 through the Kanawha River gorge, crossed the Gauley River, and continued up the New River gorge along the side of Gauley Mountain. This is one of the most primitive U.S. highways we've seen - narrow, twisty, very tight switchback turns, barely attached to the side of the mountain. A couple of times, I had to use the entire highway, swinging out across the opposite lane, to negotiate the turns. Hawk's Nest State Park is near the highest point, and we pulled in briefly, walking a short trail to an overlook 800 feet above the river, with long views in both directions. This portion of the New River is dammed, a power dam built in the late '30's. The water goes through a long tunnel from just above the dam under Gauley Mountain to a hydro generating station on the other side of the mountain. The tunnel is infamous - there were several hundred deaths from silicosis among the laborers who built it, and this became a national issue at the time. The park facilities - walkways, overlook platforms, and buildings - are massive stone structures built by the CCC, also in the late '30's.
We arrived at Bolten State Park just at dusk. There are several scenic trails radiating out from here. Also, scenic drives - several days worth, if we choose to stay. The campsites in this section of the park are located around the perimeter of a large grassy clearing, all within view of each other. The average spacing between tents is 50' or so, but it still feels crowded. We look out of place among the small tents - we seem to be the only RV, except for one pop-up. The area was mostly empty when we arrived, but it's a weekend, and more people kept arriving all evening, and more came in quietly during the night. As I write this, there's a huge communal breakfast going on a few sites down from us - apparently, we are in the middle of a large outing club or church group gathering - mostly young couples. As we left the park in the morning, we noted a "no vacancy" sign at the office.
10/11 The afternoon was spent in a long loop drive, without trailer. We went through the New River gorge - a National River. The river flows north, making us feel right at home (we lived for many years along the Genesee River, another of the very few north-flowing American rivers.) The river has been identifiably in its present bed longer than any other river on the continent, slowly cutting downward as the continent rose. The gorge is now about 900 feet deep, and in places, the walls are quite steep. This was coal-mining country. When the C&O railroad was completed through the gorge in about 1873, it enabled two large coal mines to open, and also enabled a large timber-cutting industry in the previously inaccessible region. An iron works was also established in the gorge, to use the high quality coal. The forest is regrowing now, beginning to feel quite mature. The mines were depleted and abandoned (the last one closed in the 1960's), but artifacts still abound.
When the highway climbed out of the gorge and diverged from the river, we started up a small road which continued along the river. Map'n'Go identified the road as a "state highway or major connector", and showed several towns along the way. It turned out to be not much better than a jeep trail, and the towns were non-existent - probably small logging or coal-mining settlements along the nearby railroad track. The "road" clung precariously to the cliffs, high above the river, and provided great views of the gorge. It took over an hour to cover the 20 miles. We met a few other vehicles, surprisingly, and had trouble finding a place wide enough to squeeze past. The visitor's center, at the north end of the Park, was quite well done, covering the geology and the history of the area.
10/12 The Blue Ridge Parkway is wonderful. This is a very long narrow National Park. The road was built jointly by Virginia, North Carolina, and the Federal government in the late 30's, and the whole thing is managed by the National Park Service. The long views from the overlooks are unlike any we've seen in other mountains. In the northern sections, the western slope drops very steeply, directly into the Shenandoah Valley, where we could see tiny little farms in the distance. Further along, the view is primarily of other mountains, but still it is often a very long view, with several layers of mountains getting gradually bluer in the distance. These aren't big mountains, and generally not rocky. Rather, they are some of the continent's most ancient mountains - ground down to their roots, smoothly rounded. At a few points, the highway is on a ridge so narrow that there is a great view on both sides. We only drove the first 70 miles out of a total of 485 miles. Someday, we'll go back and do the rest. As it began to get dark, we pulled into one of the NPS campgrounds. It was nearly full, and none of the remaining 3 spaces were big enough to hold our rig (this on a weekday in mid-October! Amazing.) The friendly Ranger at the entrance offered to help us call ahead and check availability at the next campground down the Parkway - about 25 miles away. We chose, instead, to get off the Parkway at the next exit, only a few miles away. We found Wildwoods, a private campground, about a mile off the Parkway, and settled into a convenient pull-through site with full hookups, for $16.72. This includes fishing privileges at a stocked private lake - catch and release only. The manager is very computer-aware, and helped us hook up to retrieve our Email. He said that he had been trying to get the local phone company to add a modular plug to their pay phone outside the office, but that the phone company was claiming that this is impossible. As we were leaving, we noted that many of the sites are wired for phone at the site, but they look like the type that can only be activated on a monthly basis by the phone company, for seasonal customers.
10/13 We left the Parkway and headed south through Danville, VA, a tobacco center (but the tobacco auctions, which we wanted to see, weren't running on Columbus Day). It's also the home of Dan River Textiles - a very large modern textile mill (no tours). The whole town, except the visitor's center, seemed to be shut down for Columbus Day.
We went on to Chapel Hill, where we had a bit of a fiasco in finding a campground. - but that will have to wait for the next chapter.