May 25-30, 2007 Charleston to West Virginia

We left Charleston and drove to Simpsonville, SC, because that was the only campground we could find that had a space available for Memorial Day Weekend! It turns out that we arrived on Friday night, the opening night of “Freedom Weekend Aloft” air balloon races and carnival. We went to watch the balloons go up but, of course, we have no idea where they landed! Kathy would have hated this campground! There were chickens and roosters and peacocks all making noise in the morning.

Mark has been suffering lately from “Connectile Dysfunction” http://www.ifilm.com/video/2819659
so we went to the Sprint and Verizon stores to compare their wireless internet pc cards. He is now quite happy with his new Sprint USB connector that allows him to connect to the internet almost everywhere!

After that we drove to downtown Greenville, SC. What a beautiful downtown area and a great park right in the middle of downtown. See the photos and read the captions to get the story.

Mark really wanted to drive the Skyline Drive and I REALLY did not want to drive it in the motor home. So on Sunday we drove around the mountains in the Jeep and did part of the Skyline Drive. We stopped at the Forestry Center and learned about how Vanderbilt hired the first forester to plan his estate. It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed our drive through the mountains. Captions on the photos tell the story.

Monday, May 28, we left to drive to Wythville, VA, to a nice campground just 1 mile off of the interstate. Today is Abby’s birthday!

On Tuesday, we drove some crazy mountain roads (even the GPS wasn’t sure where they were!) through Bluefield, WV, and on a really back road up to the Pocahontas Coal Mine. I won’t tell you all about the mine tour because the captions on the photos tell it all. We REALLY enjoyed the mine! Then we drove to the town of Bramwell to see the houses where the owners and managers of the mines lived.

On Wednesday we headed north to where we THOUGHT we were going to stay near the longest span arch bridge in the US. (It used to be the longest in the world until Japan built a longer one…) However, we were having trouble finding a campground in the mountains that could take our 40' motor home and provide water, sewer and electric. Mark finally got one campground on the phone and asked if they had a site for tonight. The girl said "Sure". So Mark asked if they had water, sewer and electric. The girl said "Sure". Mark asked if they could handle a 40' motor home and the girl said she was sure they could. She said there was one tight turn but other than that it was OK. She said she would check with the owner and call us back if the 40' motor home could NOT make it. She didn't call back. We turned off a fairly good mountain road onto the road to the campground. I thought, "This isn't too bad". Then the road turned into a very roughly paved road about 6' wide and full of deep potholes. THEN we came to the sharp left turn. We had unhooked the car from the motor home when we first entered the road, otherwise we could have never made the turn. But, Mark is a very good driver and made the turn. The campground owner had been expecting us and directed us to a "nice level sight". Mark pulled up into the trees and we looked around. There were no hook-ups for water or sewer or electric. We asked the owner about it. They have no hook-ups in the whole campground. It turns out that the girl was telling us that they had water, sewer and electric to their house! Great!! So we very carefully backed out and went 50 miles up the road to a REAL campground that is set up for big rigs! What a trip.

I’ll save the next couple of days for the “rest of the story”.

PHOTOS TO FOLLOW. BE SURE TO READ THE CAPTIONS ON THE PHOTOS. THEY TELL THE WHOLE COAL STORY. http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=x2eavjj.2n9ovyjv&Uy=-aalj51&Ux=0