We managed to leave on Wednesday night and made it all the way to the disappointingly ordinary city of Erie, Pennsylvania. The following day we stopped in the Steel City - Pittsburgh.
A view of one of the rivers in Pittsburgh (not sure if it's the Allegheny or the Monongahela).
Statues of what I am calling engineers. They look busy.
The destination for Day 2 was New River Gorge, in West Virginia. Carolyn had found out that we could camp there for free. As seems to happen on camping nights, we got there fairly late and had difficulty finding a campsite. We drove through the first of several shanty towns we would encounter on the trip; I would consider them Class D ghost towns, but sorry, we didn't stop to take pictures. I'm sure I could hear a banjo playing in the distance. After driving for hours around unmarked, dirt roads in the middle of seemingly-nowhere, we finally found a spot by the river that had a picnic table and a grill, so we set up for the night. I took some night shots but they were pretty crappy. Here is a sample (not flickr-worthy) that shows we were in a valley.
The next morning, we figured out where we had been camping. Did I mention that we had some wine with dinner the previous night? From cartons!
Anyway, we got up early (around 6ish) to see the bridge in some good morning light. I'm not terribly pleased with my digital photos, but I am hopeful about my film ones that I have yet to process.
Supposedly you can stack two Statues of Liberty plus one Washington Monument beneath that bridge... or perhaps it is one of the former and two of the latter? Try it and let me know!
