Finding West Virginia Adventures

I'm settling in nicely in my new hometown of Charleston, West Virginia. It's a great place to live, I think. There are things I am missing about Richmond--mostly fancy grocery stores and the huge number of awesome restaurants. There's not so much of that here, but the cool thing is that there is room for growth.  And I pretty much really love my job.

We've been camping twice since we moved in six weeks ago. We've also had some great day adventures. West Virginia is seriously full of adventures, but you have to seek them out a little. Every single weekend, there's some kind of great festival or event happening in Charleston or in a nearby town. And if you're not interested in that, there's plenty of outdoorsy and cultural stuff to do. This weekend, the West Virginia Book Festival is going on, and next Saturday will be Bridge Day in Fayetteville about an hour away. There are always little small-town things going on nearby, Apple and Pumpkin harvest festivals this time of year, with parades and music and BBQ for sale. I love that these things are rarely so crowded that they become miserable. Another great thing about West Virginia.

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We camped in Audra State Park back in September. The park is situated on a small river, the East Fork River? Fork river something, can't remember. The campground is pretty nice (but not nice enough for the $20 price for a tent site, I don't think). There was a funny smell at our particular site, but I could never figure out what it might be. Some sites were very private but not on the river. We sacrificed privacy for our river spot. Here was our site and our view of the river.

It rained almost all weekend while we camped in Audra State Park. So we did a lot of indoor stuff. It turned out pretty great though. We went to a big antique mall. Had a nice meal in Weston at the Thyme Bistro. We toured the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, WV. It was $10/person for a guided tour of one floor. And it was pretty cool. Definitely worth that 10 bucks.

The weather was finally beautiful during the last day of this trip. On the way home (sort of), we went to the West Virginia State Wildlife Center. It's like a zoo, I guess, and I do usually hate zoos. This one was pretty neat, though. Animals that are native to or that are now found in the state live here at the Wildlife Center, and you get to read about each animal at their exhibit. I saw some animals I had never seen, like coyotes and fishers. There were also deer, bears, snakes, owls, bison, elk, foxes, wolves, raccoons, hawks, and lots more. This place used to be a "game farm" where biologists would raise animals and release them back into the wild to help increase their populations, but then it became clear that animals raised in captivity would not survive well in the wild. The Wildlife Center's goals have now shifted toward education. It costs $3 per person to walk around the Wildlife Center--absolutely worth it!

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A couple weeks ago, we met my parents at Bluestone State Park for a short camping trip.  I really like this park and wish we had spent more time there. The early October weather was great, but the campground was practically empty. Bluestone Lake is beautiful. You can rent a boat to enjoy for a few hours or for the day, but we didn't have the time to during this trip. It looked like there were also some nice hiking trails in the park. So I want to go back next season. We followed the New River on the way back to Charleston, making a stop at Sandstone Falls.

And on the way home, we stopped in Beckley for a meal at King Tut Drive In. OH MY GOODNESS, SO MUCH HAPPINESS HERE! It's just so much fun to go here. It makes eating in your car feel fancy or something! The food is mostly fried, but a lot of it is "homemade." I had fried oysters! Not bad. Matt had a BBQ sandwich which he really enjoyed too. We will definitely be eating here again when we're going through Beckley. They have a website with a menu, by the way.

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Tomorrow I'll be working at the WV Book Festival for most of the day. I'm starting to get busy, which is nice. It definitely took some time for me to settle in, and Matt is requiring a little more time than I did because he's figuring out the employment scene up here. I shouldn't really speak for him, but I do think we love living in West Virginia so far.

Adventure in Pocahontas County, WV

So, it's July now? How did that happen? I feel like yesterday it was March.

Boyfriend and I took a couple days off before Memorial Day weekend to take a camping vacation to Pocahontas County, West Virginia. The drive to Seneca State Forest from Richmond is 3.5 hours and very lovely. We arrived on a Thursday evening to just a few people in the campground.

I read about this campground in The Best in Tent Camping: West Virginia by Johnny Molloy. It is a nice little campground with a small stream running through it, perfect for tent camping and rather uninviting for RV's. Each campsite has a critter-proof trashcan (which is nice) and a totally sweet stone grill. The campsites are big, and when the campground was only half-full on Thursday night, it felt a lot like camping in wilderness. The campground filled completely on Friday and Saturday nights, and though we had some obnoxious neighbors with terrible camping etiquette, they were pretty distant from us. Those neighbors would NOT have been bearable in a cramped Virginia State Park campground.

The Seneca State Forest Campground has a pit toilet, and a short drive away there are full-service bathrooms with coin showers. That was nice, because I do not care for pit toilets. The Park also has "frontier" cabins which I would LOVE to stay in some time. The cabins are on the Greenbrier River and on a small lake and provide plenty of activities for families. 
On Friday morning after breakfast, we went to the library in Webster Springs so that I could do some genealogy research. Then we went to Cass Scenic Railroad State Park for Ribs and Rails!

We had a nice train ride up to a mountain clearing, where there were picnic tables and a little picnic pavilion. For a reasonable price, we had all-you-can eat cookout fare, including pork ribs, boiled corn, potato salad, cornbread, coleslaw, baked beans... you get the idea. I don't eat pork, but there was plenty to eat even without the ribs! There was a bluegrass band, kids playing in the grass, and cold sweet tea. We had gorgeous weather and it was an awesome dinner out, West Virginia style. Seeing the company town of Cass was also interesting. The depot is on the beautiful Greenbrier River and there's an interesting little museum about the history of the town (see the picture above featuring the creepy stuffed baby bear). There's also a "company store" with knick-knacks, snacks, and train souvenirs.

The next day we went to the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area for a walk through the Cranberry Bog. This is a cool place and feels totally strange in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains. A boardwalk runs through the bog to protect the plants.

We drove to the opposite side of the county to the Gaudineer Scenic Area where we followed signs for the "virgin spruce trees." There are about 90 acres of forest here than have never been timbered. The forest feels primeval. I never knew much about spruce trees, but they're fascinating. They have shallow root systems so they can grow on top of rocks. They also are prone to falling, and you can see the shallow root system of a fallen tree in the picture below. The forest here is mossy and wild. I loved it.

We also visited Beartown State Park, which features crazy and huge rock formations. People once believed that bears lived among the rocks, but I would think monsters lived here. This park is free, and there was a handful of families on the boardwalks walking among the formations.

Other highlights during the trip included a visit to the Green Bank Telescope, the largest moving telescope in the US. We visited the science center which wasn't very exciting, but we decided not to pay for a tour. I snapped a few pictures of the telescope, but pictures cannot really illustrate how big the telescope is. Pretty neat, right in the middle of the West Virginia mountains.

We also went searching for Pocahontas County's only covered bridge. I saw Locust Creek Covered bridge on the county tourism map, which didn't really give good directions to get there. So we had a little adventure and drove up and down some country roads to look for a road with Locust Creek in the name, and we finally found it.

We had a little rain on this trip, but it didn't get us down. Matt was sick with a cold, so our tourism was of the inactive sort--no climbing mountains or swimming because I was worried about his health and afraid he might cough up a lung. I wish I had planned a little better. I thought the Monongahela National Forest would be easier to explore without much planning. Next time I'll buy a map first.

So, I also have some news to tack onto the end of this post. Big news that deserves more than a tack, really. I've been offered a job near Charleston, WV. I'll be moving there, and I'm taking my boyfriend with me, too. I hope we'll be able to have mountain adventures all the time. I am really, really excited about this next chapter in life.

Recipe: Campfire Quinoa Stew

Things have been crazy around here. That's why I haven't written. Boyfriend and I took a couple days off and had an extra long Memorial Day weekend camping in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. I also have a job interview in West Virginia in a couple weeks which has had my mind working overtime.

Anyway, while we were camping I made a tasty campfire stew that I want to remember the recipe for. I'm naming it Campire Quinoa Stew, and here are the ingredients:

- Half of a large sweet onion, diced
- Half of a bell pepper, diced
- A large carrot (or a bunch of baby carrots, diced
- a cube and a half of vegetable bouillon
- 2 tblsp olive or sunflower oil
- 1.5 c of water
- 3/4 c uncooked quinoa
- a big handful of uncooked lentils
- diced roasted red tomatoes (I bought the Kroger brand because it featured a pop-top can lid, requiring no can opener.)

Clearly these ingredients are pretty flexible, but I chose veggies I'd be using in other meals as well and other stuff that would be easy to handle while camping. It would be delicious with any bean but I didn't want to take a can opener so I used lentils instead since they can be cooked pretty quickly. The campfire smokiness is what made the stew special but I'm still going to cook something similar at home, I'm sure. My recipe yielded 3-4 servings and it's more filling that you'd expect.

In a campfire-safe soup pot, sautee the onion, carrot, and pepper in olive oil until they start to become tender. Throw in your veggie bouillon. Throw in your quinoa. Stir it all up and let sautee for a couple minutes.

Add water and canned tomatoes. Add lentils. Stir. Once the soup starts boiling, move it to a cooler part of the fire, cover, and allow to simmer. How long the soup needs to simmer depends on your fire. Mine simmered for 30-40 minutes and I just checked it every 10 mins until the lentils were tender.

I think this meal will go into our regular gourmet camping dinner rotation. It's healthy, filling, and highly nutritious. Like every other meal I make while camping, it took forever to cook! Get started early because it takes a good hot fire to get the veggies sauteed and the liquids boiling.

I will post more about the trip soon. It was fun but Boyfriend had a nasty cold so we sort of took it easy. Saw lots of beautiful things though and came home feeling refreshed.

Weekend Camping and C&O Heritage Center Visit

It's Monday. I am off work today, and I'm going to write two blog posts. My post-vacation blues were pretty severe last week. I decided I better make this work week a shorter one, so I took a vacation day today to catch up on things like laundry and running errands. And rest. And my blog. And I decided a short autumn camping trip was in order.

And the camping trip did indeed make my ordinary life look a little brighter. The fall colors are at their peak in the mountains. We stayed at the Morris Hill Campground near Lake Moomaw, about a 3 hour drive from Richmond. The campground was just about empty. There were two other families there. I can't believe there were so few people out enjoying the incredible weather over the weekend.

We didn't do anything too exciting on this trip. The idea was to relax. And it was very relaxing. We mostly sat around the campfire and talked to each other. And I drank a lot of beer. I made a really tasty campfire dinner (roasted cauliflower with shallots, grilled chicken thighs, and yellow saffron rice, all cooked to miraculous perfection). When I unfolded our air mattress, it was covered in mold, and so we slept on the hard, cold ground. But I even enjoyed that.

We stopped in Clifton Forge on the way there to visit the C&O Heritage Center. There was some sort of town-wide festival happening in Clifton Forge, which meant there were a lot of people at the museum, but a full staff of volunteers was there to tell us all about the trains and buildings and things. Boyfriend is the train nerd, but I really enjoyed this outing as well.

We got to go inside this old engine. It was pretty neat!

This is all the crazy stuff the engineer had to keep an eye on.

The dining car is lovely. Has a working kitchen and may be rented for events.

I loved the Chessie Cat china in the dining car.

Pretty comfortable, but very close together.

Freight car.

A little desk cubby place in the caboose, for the conductor I guess.

An older caboose.

A beautiful day to visit the C&O Heritage Center.

We were gonna get up early and go fishing at Lake Moomaw on Sunday morning, but we slept in instead (a little too long). On the way home, we stopped in Afton for a visit to the Blue Mountain Brewery. We tasted all the beers they had on tap ($8 for 9 shot glasses of craft beer) and had a very tasty snack. It was a fun visit, but due to the proximity to Charlottesville and UVA, there were a lot of white people with fancy shoes there, which I found distracting in an unwanted sort of way. Blue Mountain makes some great beer (I am especially fond of the seasonal Pumpkin and the Blue Reserve varieties, and they also make a great Virginia Pale Ale). I shall not tell you how much money was spent on the beer we left there with... they're seasonal brews! One of a kind! Artisanal! 

A growler of Blue Mountain's Blue Reserve, on my kitchen counter!

Well, it's after noon now and I better get out of my pajamas. I have to go to Petsmart for cat supplies. Butter Bean is something like 14 in cat years, and her teenage qualities are pretty extreme. I am hoping that buying a new scratching post will distract her from scratching up the couch. I'm such a cat slave.

Grayson Highlands State Park

No exciting adventures are happening in my life right now. I'm still thoroughly stressed over budgeting and saving for the trip to Switzerland. I really need to stop letting the money get in the way of the general excitement of going there. I already booked the damn trip. I may as well get used to the idea of being broke. Even though money is tight, I think I could still afford a camping trip in the Outer Banks over Labor Day weekend (which also happens to fall on Boyfriend's birthday weekend). Boyfriend only gets 5 vacation days a year, and he says we don't have enough money, and he doesn't want to go. I am resentful.

Anyway, I'm going to share a few pictures from a trip to Southwest Virginia and Grayson Highlands State Park, where we visited last year during a long Labor Day weekend. We had planned to go to the beach, but a hurricane came, so we ran to the mountains instead. It was a really nice trip, and Grayson Highlands is a great park. We camped in a National Forest campground called Hurricane Campground, in the Mt. Rogers recreation area, about an hour away from Grayson Highlands.

Grayson Highlands has lots of excellent hiking. Overnight hikers park here and then do their overnight backpacking thing, which is not comfortable enough for me. During our day there, we did a short hike through the woods to see a few small waterfalls, and then we hiked up into the highlands to see the strange landscape and adorable wild ponies.

 

Much of the park is set on these mountaintop "balds." There are wild ponies there which help keep the vegetation down. The landscape is like nothing I've seen in Virginia. There were wild blueberry bushes along the beginning of the trail. I picked and ate a few.

My pictures really can't do the mountain views justice. The elevation is high here, compared to what everyone is used to in Virginia. It just sort of feels different. Can you see how blue the sky is? And then there are the little wild ponies. They are super cute and kind of grumpy.

If you're a mountain lover like me, I definitely recommend a trip to the Grayson Highlands. You'll experience a different kind of mountain landscape from much of what you've seen in lush Appalachia. I didn't pay much attention to the campground in the state park (I much prefer quiet national park campgrounds to the busier and more modern Virginia State Parks), but it seemed nice and not too crowded even on Labor Day weekend. The Hurricane Campground was a great central spot for us to expore the Mt. Rogers area, and we had a nice time hiking, driving through the countryside, fishing in the New River, and visiting the Grayson Highlands. It was a super relaxing weekend, and I hope we can go back soon.

Visit to Natural Bridge

A few posts back, I said I'd write about visiting Virginia's own Natural Bridge. So here we go!

The Natural Bridge is pretty cool. It's bigger than you think it's going to be. The company that owns it uses its awe-inspiring size to sell religious experiences. There was a sunrise service there on Easter morning, the day I visited. There is also a regularly scheduled light show titled, "The Drama of Creation," which takes place on the stone of the Natural Bridge at dusk. But it really is beautiful. By purchasing online, I got tickets to Natural Bridge and its related attractions for half-off the normal price of $28 per adult.

There's also a nice path that goes on for a mile or so past Natural Bridge, following a stream to the "Lace Waterfalls" (pretty, but not awe-inspiring). The path is brick and crushed stone and is a good thing for the whole family. I took my dog, who enjoyed the adventure and managed to poop on the sidewalk next to the scenic stream. 

Stream and Lace Waterfalls

There is a reenacted Indian village on the grounds, to which we paid little attention. There are two other tourist traps also on the property, including a toy "museum" and a wax museum. Please skip the toy museum. It is not worth the time required to walk through the room. Unless you are really into toys maybe. 

The wax museum, you may take or leave. It's interesting as long as you like tacky, animatronic wax people created during the 1970's--which I kind of do, it turns out. There's also a museum in the wax workshop where they sculpt the wax people, though it doesn't seem that it has seen any use in the last 15-20 years.

The gift shop at Natural Bridge is HUGE and TACKY! We did have sandwiches there which were not terribly expensive or bad (or good).

Underground River in the Cave

 

Some Kind of Big Cave Rock Formation

I think my favorite part of the whole Natural Bridge experience, though, was Natural Bridge Caverns, just a short drive (or tram ride) away from the Natural Bridge site. I hadn't been inside a cave as an adult, and I really enjoyed it. It's hard to take any good pictures inside a cave without some crazy National Geographic equipment, so you can't see how beautiful it was by looking at my pictures. Our cave tour guide could have been less irritating, but the dark, stony, cold awesomeness made up for it. And it IS cold in there! Take your sweater, and wear sturdy, non-slippery shoes. Boyfriend was wearing moccasins (not smart).

The entire economy of the Natural Bridge area must revolve around tourism and crazy tourist traps. There are a number of weird roadside attractions nearby, like Foamhenge. We were really happy with our experience, though, and I definitely recommend the National Forest campground where we stayed near Natural Bridge Station at Cave Mountain Lake.