Blue Ridge Country And The Smokies

Travel Day

• Jonesville, NC to Charleston, WV via I-64
• Charleston, WV to Morgantown, WV via I-79

We awoke to find this in the sky. It went on for a long way.

For some reason the highway was very busy, filled with trucks of every kind. Remember, this is the interstate, not a local highway.

As the hills got higher and steeper, the clouds stayed with us, constantly threatening.

Those mountains off in the distance, and the hills we are driving through, are part of the Appalachian chain. These lower hills are the Piedmont formation, the mountains in the distance are the Great Smokey Mountains, and beyond them is the Blue Ridge Plateau.

This is another shot of the way the local hills get steeper and sharper, with the Smokies off in the background.

Then the sky burst open and all those clouds started to release their rain. It's a regular spring morning.

This is why they are called the Smokies. No matter what the weather, this bank of mist constantly hangs on to their sides. These are short, steep mountains so the mist clings, and, once it rises, becomes the clouds that we dealt with earlier.

Sometimes it's just easier to go through the hills instead of over or around them. With the steepness in such a low hill, a tunnel makes a lot of sense.

From Virginia to West Virginia. President Lincoln created West Virginia to allow the region to become a Union state in 1862. It had different economic interests than Virginia. In Virginia there is more farming. Slaves were important there. In West Virginia there is more resource extraction such as coal mining, an industry not conducive to the use of slaves, at least in America. It had more ties to the industrial north than it did to the agricultural south.

Coal. Did I mention coal? It's a big deal here in West Virginia. This is just outside the state capitol of Charleston.

There are a lot of older homes in Charleston. This one looks like it needs a roof repair.

On the other hand, the roof of the state capitol building looks just fine, all covered in gold. It is ever thus, that those in power use the money from the rest of use to aggrandize themselves.