Category: Moving West

Up around 6:45. Beautiful, sunny morning. Made some coffee and then started some oatmeal. The fire was still smoking outside. internet was working better this morning so I did some graphics work before and during breakfast

After breakfast I went down to the creek for a swim before packing up and hitting the road. We’re going to make some tracks towards a spot in Kentucky today. I have to teach at 6 so Pam will find us a stop once we get on the road.

Leaving the campground we got a call from Roger so we talked to him while we drove out on the windy road. Beautiful country. Kind of reminds me of Maine a bit. Rolling hills, lots of fields. Maybe more like Vermont.

We didn’t take a lot of pics today because we were driving a lot. But here are a few. The town we stopped in to eat and teach a bit was St. Albans, West Virginia. Pam had found a “city park” on free campsites.net. When we arrived, the sign said 2 night maximum but the campers that took up all the spots looked like they had been there for 2 years! The park was right on the Kanawha river and there was a boat launch. It looked like a nice spot but there were no sites.

We went across the road to a Walmart that had been closed and checked the signal. Not good so we moved on. We just kept our eyes peeled for a cell tower and we didn’t go two blocks before Pam spied one. The area I pulled over in looked very rough. We decided to keep moving.

A few miles down route 817 I spotted a small park by the river. We turned around and I pulled down the steep driveway. There were a couple civil war monuments and a path down to the river. I fired up the generator to get the AC going and Pammie took a stroll down the path. When I joined here, she was shaking her head to the negative. Unfortunately, the area was totally trashed…like, covered with trash.

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We ordered some takeout from a diner close by and took out lives in our hands walking down 817 about a mile to pick up the food. Back at the camper we chowed with the AC on. I taught a couple lessons, with not very good results, and then we took off.

We pulled into the Kentucky Welcome Center around 8, I think? It was quite crowded with trucks so we pulled in a car parking spot. Fired up the generator again to cool her down and made a couple cocktails…with bourbon to celebrate Kentucky! I didn’t take any pics and I didn’t sleep great either but it was free and perfect for the night.

The Shell station we slept at was at an intersection right off route 81 in Clear Brook, Virginia. There was an Amazon distribution center a block away from us. I think all the Amazon employees have put fart cannons on their cars so when they leave work their boss can hear them driving all the way home! There was a lot of muffler noise in the night but Pammie slept like a very tired child educator who now only had one 61-year-old child to worry about. Things would change rapidly but, for now, she was very rested.

I went into Dunkies next door and got us a couple coffees and a couple of gut bombs and then I got to work on a graphics project and then did a saxophone lesson.

While I was working Pam pulled her bike off the bike rack – which was on the inside between my bike and the camper. How she did it, I’ll never know but it was not easy, for sure!

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When she came back from her ride, she pulled a chair out of the cargo hold and sat up on a little hill behind the camper to get some shade and check in on the digital realm. Before long she came in and showed me the Facebook post from the “Friends of Cross Lake”. RUBY HAD BEEN FOUND! So much for relaxation! The crisis of today has been revealed and it is time to rise to the occasion.

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This is good news and a tragedy all rolled into one. WTF do we do now? We knew Rubes was, and is, a survivor. We knew our Cross Lake family had much more on their hands than a visiting stray cat who decided to stray again. We really didn’t want them to have to deal with her but the person that found her couldn’t keep her and was either going to take her back to the Hale’s or to the SPCA.

I’ve said many derogatory things about Ruby but they were all just measured declarations of love. Right?! How can you NOT love a stray cat that has destroyed every door frame and every piece of furniture in your home and spends every day turning money into disgusting litter box offerings that need to be chiseled out and thrown away every two days? Petco loves her even more than I do!

Before I’m done working Pam has come up with a solution to our plight and the folks in the county are fighting over the opportunity to have their homes ruined by our orphaned kitty.

Today is going to be a rest day. We’re headed for the Lazy A campground and I can hardly wait. We gas up at our host’s while Pam works on the remedy to Ruby’s plight.

We drive over some windy roads, under a bridge of questionable height and lo and behold, wind up at Lazy A Campground which, at first, looks to be in the back yard of a housing development but turns out to be quite nice. Quiet, very lightly populated and beautiful! I’ll let the pics speak for themselves.

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There is a creek at the Lazy A campground. We rode our bikes all the way down the field road and came to an embankment where you could jump into a nice deep pool…if you wanted to. Someone had also rigged up a rope swing with a pair of bike handlebars tied to some nylon rope. We took a nice dip and then went back to our campsite to get the fire going.

We cooked up some burgers on the fire and then sat and watched a thunderstorm roll in over the hills. With twenty minutes or so you couldn’t even tell there were any hills there!