A Journey's Beginning - West Virginia

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”
― Pat Conroy

In the last week of September, we started out on a journey north.  We didn't have a destination as much as we had a path.  Our path took us through Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and back to Kingsport Tennessee.  We had a list of places to stop along the way and enough time to stop at the unexpected roadside scenes. I'm replaying our journey in several blog posts over the next couple of weeks. I'll share photos from our trip and at least one thing I learned along the way.

We used a new app called Roadtrippers to plan this trip.  There is a website and mobile apps to help the traveler find interesting places to see along the way.  You start at a location and add a destination.  You can visually find and add things to the trip along the map creates.  We found several of our planned stops along the 2,428-mile route.  You can see our planned trip here.  We didn't hit all the sites along the way and added some using the mobile app.  The Roadtrippers app is useful for planning a trip and you will definitely find more than you could ever do along the way.  It relies on people providing reviews of the different points of interest and suffers from a lack of reviews.  If it lasts and gets more users/reviews then it can be a very useful tool.

Bush Creek Falls

Our first stop on our first day was an unplanned trip down a narrow winding road to Bush Creek Falls in West Virginia, which June found using the Roadtrippers app.  This was a nice find and we will go back in the spring when there is more water going over the falls.

On our first day out I learned that you can't trust websites that predict fall color.  According to the experts, the West Virginia hillsides should have been ablaze with reds, yellows, and oranges. What we saw was either more green or brown drought-stricken leaves on the ground.  We thought the leaf colors would be past peak as we moved further north but we mostly found only patches of call color.

Above Pipestem Lodge. Photo by June

Above The Bluestone River Gorge

We made a stop at Pipestem State Park and hiked out to a rock outcrop to gaze down into the gorge.  With no fall color, the most interesting photo was of June's hiking pole hanging on an old tree at the edge.

One of the most photographed spots in West Virginia is the Glade Creek Grist Mill at Babcock State Park. The mill sits above some large rock slabs where Glade Creek cascades over to create beautiful waterfalls below the mill.  This year has been dry all over the East and there was very little water flowing just on one side of the rocks.

Glade Creek Grist Mill

Glade Creek

When nature doesn't provide grand waterfalls to photograph, the photographer must look closer to find subjects of interest. Sometimes it might require artistic rearranging of leaves.

While I was climbing around the rocks looking for waterfall photos, June was making beautiful photos of flowers and bees.

Photo by June

Reflections on Boley Lake

Less than a mile upstream from the Mill is a small man-made lake.  We did find a little fall color here.  Thinking we will see a lot of trees with fall colors later on in our trip, I choose to photograph the reflections of the trees instead of the trees themselves.

We also stopped at the New River Bridge and the caught a disappointing sunset when we crossed the Ohio River at Ravenswood, WV.  Ravenswood sits on land once owned by George Washington and the town streets and lots were laid out in their current pattern by descendants of George Washington in 1835. By this time we were running late and needed to get moving along down the road.

The next day we spent several hours exploring Hocking Hills State Park on the way to Michigan to visit our son and daughter-in-law. More about that park in the next installment of our travels.

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass