2016/08 Newf'land trip - Forked Run |
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We had a long up and down ramble through hilly terrain and country villages, a pretty drive but rather slow. The quilt shop in Somerset was easy to find, in a strip mall, but access to Uniontown was blocked off by emergency services; whether it was a real disaster or just a drill we couldn’t tell. I made a long detour, far enough away to force the GPS to find an alternative route, but we got lost in a maze of narrow hillbilly tracks. But it did eventually work and we found another way into Uniontown only to discover that the shop was closed on Mondays anyway.
We were still in pretty country but we passed two disaster sites. The Johnstown Flood happened in the 1880s when a dam gave way, killing thousands, and Shanksville is where United flight 93 crashed on 9/11.
When we came to plan the rest of the day’s route we discovered that our GPS couldn’t find any of the quilt shops. Before we left home I’d upgraded it to the latest maps but found they were bigger and didn’t fit. (This was after I’d paid of course.) All I could fit into the memory was Canada and the Northern USA, without any details on what “northern” meant. I’d tested it to see if it found West Virginia’s cities and it did, so I thought we’d be OK. Now it looked like the cities and major highways were in there but not the city streets.
Sure enough, as we crossed the border into West Virginia, the GPS only showed the freeway we were on and the rest went grey. We were definitely in the Twilight Zone. Obviously we could still find our way home with paper maps, but finding all those quilt shops was going to be difficult. I had an old copy of Streets and Trips on the laptop but that’s not readable in bright light so we’d have to sketch maps and write down directions, fine until you make one wrong turn!
The good news was that despite its reputation as a strip-mining state, this part of West Virginia was green and hilly, part of the Appalachian range. This was our first visit to the state, and we’ve now set foot in all fifty states.
Our first shop was in Morgantown, sprawling along the Monongahela River. As expected, we did a couple of loops before we found that one but Sandie said it was a beautiful pattern, worth the effort. But that was our last success as the one in Clarksburg was closed on Mondays and we never found the one in Parkersburg. We found the road but they don’t bother displaying house numbers there and we searched the whole road with no luck. Sandie asked at one business but they didn’t know their own number! It might have been in a nearby grungy trailer park but we gave up. It had been a frustrating day, 2 for 5.
We crossed into Ohio and drove down the Ohio River valley to a state park called Forked Run. They seem to have a different name set down there with their hollows and knobs and runs; I think “run” is the local name for a creek. The park’s campground is spread over some very steep hills, but we found a level site in an empty section, just us and the frogs and cicadas.