New River gorge

I remember when I was a kid the trip up to my Grandma's in West Virginia seemed really long. I'd bring along books, games, pencil and paper and usually ended up trying to amuse myself by counting the number of cars vs the number of trucks that we passed or something like that. The only interesting bits were passing the very occasional city, or the more frequent large mining operation. Oh and the tollbooths, and the three tunnels under the mountians. And barges on the Ohio river. But to a kid, most of the trip seemed to consist of the boring bits inbetween, and I tried hard to fill them with some kind of value.

I guess I'm still doing that because on a recent drive back from Charlotte, I found myself tooling up I-77 with my laptop on, hooked up to the car's speakers and talking to me, sniffing for some hidden interests besides the winding highway and occasional pretty view. Which is to say for, wireless networks and geocaches.

I've made that trip up 77 many times, and every time I've driven over the New River gorge and blamed the bridge and the speed from giving me only a one second glimpse of the river. This time I learned that there was a cache somewhere approximatly under that bridge, and so I turned off a few miles before and headed up the road through a little town, being suprised to find some wireless networks on the way, and ended up at a converted railroad trestle, now a horse path, with a really nice view of the river and all around.

I never did find the cache, because of some boring software issues that had me off by hundreds of feet from its real location, but that's ok, I'm just glad I finally stopped to see the New River, and happy that I turned that trip into something of more value than just a journey to a destination.