So I've been quite bad at updating this thing regularly, but an impromptu road trip has made it paramount that I fire up the ol' blog for its most storied purpose: as a travelogue that people (mostly me) can look at from here until the day the planet's wiped out in roughly five weeks.
After having traveled for work and collecting a nice bit of compensatory time, Dana and I decided it would be prime to take this entire week off and drive to New Orleans, a trip we've been planning since last year's California venture. This time, however, I'd be driving my own car, and we'd have multiple days at the destination, combining a great city with another awesome journey. As usual, I've done a fair bit of planning for stops along the way, and hopefully they'll be as entertaining as last year's fun. So without further ado...
Saturday, November 17
Origin: Moorestown, New Jersey
States Traversed: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia
Destination: Barboursville, West Virginia
We got going a little later than I would have preferred, a quarter after eleven, and after a quick Taco Bell snack we were on our way! I plugged in the first address to the GPS and it was about an hour before we realized that the GPS was set on highway avoidance, taking us through a nice (read: extremely not nice) area of Philadelphia. By the time we realized this, we were close enough to I-95 to almost compensate for lost time, and we were right on our way.
The first stop was to observe the titular CURSED STONE, a little hunk of rock on the side of the road that nobody dared to move or dig up, lest they suffer the consequences.
The thing's a bit hard to read, but long story short, it declares that the one to "removeth" the stone would be forever cursed. We actually almost missed this, but as I pulled over into a parking lot to turn around, voila, it just happened to be there. I touched it, but didn't move it, as I don't need another hex working in concert with the roughly four dozen others I already have.
After a failed bit of searching for a statue of little-known "first President of the United States" John Hanson, we pulled over to a rest stop to take care of business and grab a drink. The view was pretty fantastic at the stop, not to mention that the interstate made a nice path directly through a mountainside near it.
Things sure do work differently in Maryland
After the stop, we continued westward down the tiny strip of Maryland that lies between Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Next up was a rather odd religious landmark. Apparently in the 1970s, a man named Richard Greene, a pastor, decided that God had told him to rebuild the most well known floating object in history: Noah's Ark. Needless to say, he would rebuild it in the middle of the rural Maryland on the side of an interstate, hundreds of miles from the ocean.
Sadly, the Ark remains woefully incomplete. It looks as though it would just immediately sink to the bottom and/or collapse given any amount of rain whatsoever in this state:
You guys have some work to do, Flood 2: Electric Boogaloo could be right around the corner!
The Ark, at least, has a good view
The sun ended up setting on our journey shortly thereafter, but we still had four or so hours to go. Our dinner plans took us to Morgantown, WV, of which I was unaware. The restaurant seemed to be absent, but the stadium near where we were searching was filled with cars. Rabid fans streamed across streets with no discernible pattern, so it was all I could do not to hit them as we searched for the restaurant. Eventually, though, we did end up finding it. It was a place called the Kenyan Cafe:
Dana's Matoke paired with goat stew. Not pictured: my meal, same thing with beef stew
The owner and patrons were great, chatting us up as we waited for our meal. It was way too much for either of us to finish, but it was incredible and unique, consisting of unripened plantains, cabbage/kale, and an amazing stew to go with it all. After filling up one last time, we hit the road for the last three hour home stretch of our day's journey.
To go along with it was The Bugle, a podcast I'd never listened to but I can see being a lifetime fan of. It involves John Oliver (of Daily Show fame) and Andy Zaltzman describing and riffing on both US and UK political news. It made the time fly by, and before we knew it we were pulling up to a familiar sight: the Hampton Inn in Barboursville, WV.
Tomorrow should be even more eventful, when we traverse Kentucky and Tennessee, and we'll be one day out from our destination! Stay tuned for caves of mammoth proportions, a museum for the likes of Kitt, and a freakish combination of a boy scout and catfish.
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