Day 1 - Home to Charleston, WV

This blog will cover our 16-day trip from our home in the Philadelphia area to the delta region of Mississippi to visit the Hot Tamale Festival in Greenville, MS. Along the way we plan to stop at Mammoth Cave National Park, visit some Abraham Lincoln sites, and also tour northern Mississippi a little.

WVU Coliseum

Day 1 was mostly driving. About 8 hours in fact. We got to see some really beautiful scenery in the panhandle region of Maryland along I-68 from Hagerstown, MD and on the way to Morgantown, WV. Although this is early October, the trees were changing in the mountains and gave a colorful backdrop to the valleys along the way. West Virginia, on the other hand, wasn’t quite as scenic as it was a constant array of mountains, with very few flat spots.

Napier, WV

We stopped briefly in Morgantown to drive around the University of West Virginia campus. That campus really isn’t very pretty and it is a lot of up and down walking, so it must be difficult getting to and from classes. We saw the football stadium and stopped to look into the basketball arena on Jerry West Way. One thing that I especially liked was parking in Coach Huggins personal reserved parking spot. Never did like that guy.

From Morgantown we drove to Charleston where we spent the night. We did make one quick stop in Napier, WV, (population 10, counting dogs and chickens) for a photo op in our namesake town. The GPS did try to play games with us here and try to send us off on a dirt road, but when we got to where we had to ford a two foot deep stream, we turned around and took a more main road and let the GPS catch up with us.

West Virginia State Capitol Building

Charleston, on the other hand, is a cute town situated on the Kanawha River.  The state capitol overlooks the river with University of Charleston on the other side. One of the best locations for a capitol building that we have seen, and we have seen a lot. One interesting thing about the capitol grounds is that they have two very different statues. One is General Stonewall Jackson (local boy) and the other is of Abraham Lincoln, who was president when the state was created.