Charleston or Bust

We've made it to the end of the road! I'm tucked up in a hotel in historic downtown Charleston and Evan is with his friends, who live about 18 miles out of town. I wanted to be able to explore before it gets unbearably hot tomorrow, which will be for about 15 minutes between 7:30 and 7:45 am. Just as well I brought nifty cool-max clothing to wear.

Evan has done the bulk of the driving and I've knitted. I decided to knit a "something" with each state's colors. Upon discovering that only about four states actually have official colors, I went to a Crayola website where they've assigned a color to each state. My finished "something" depicts our journey in chronological color and size, though Montana (sky blue) looks disproportionally large because of the yarn I used. At the end of the Montana day, my backside thought it was pretty dang large too (the state, that is!) My very clever daughters-in-law will no doubt have excellent suggestions as to how I can display this project.


Our day yesterday, through Ohio, West Va. and halfway through Virginia wasn't one of our most stellar. Evan was tired from too much socializing so I drove most of the day. It rained, the only time on the trip of course, so hard I couldn't see the road at one stage. Must have stayed on it ok because we're here to tell the tale.

Tobacco fields in Ohio

Virginia farmland

I confess to being cranky, so by the time we got to our lovely stop in Wytheville, VA, we were barely speaking to each other. But, a good nights sleep worked its wonders and we're back on good footing today.

It took forever, but finally there was an overlook to take in the vistas of the Appalachian hills. They were every bit as spectacular as we expected. We were looking over the Bluestone River in West Va here.

Tunnel in West Virginia

I was amazed at how like New Zealand the part of Virginia is that we zoomed through. Green pastures, hills, and leafy trees. And cows too.

North Carolina was mostly trees-lining-the-highway pretty. I'm sure there was other land out there but we couldn't see it for the trees.

We crossed into South Carolina, ready for lunch and stopped at a busy exit. We were pulling in to the Burger King when I spied this across the road...


Wouldn't you stop there to join the locals for home- cooking? I had the best beef-vegie soup ever and a grilled cheese sandwich and Evan had a prime rib sandwich. These are the stops that make a journey's shining memories.

So now we're done, almost. There's a day of sightseeing tomorrow in this most historic of cities...