“Wild and Wonderful” West Virginia?

**Disclaimer: I had no idea Rob had already posted about our day when I wrote this, so just ignore mine!*

Jill's Journal: We left Cave City yesterday morning with no idea how far east we’d make it. The answer turned out to be 370 miles, a far cry from the old days, pre-kids and pre-fifth wheel, when a good day of driving on a road trip was easily twice that. But as Rob put it last night, we have a “lot of baggage” now and we were very pleased to get as far as we did. Especially in West Virginia…

Billed as “wild and wonderful,” we instead found West Virginia to be heavily wooded and pretty wicked. Rob and I had spent a weekend in Charleston once before and enjoyed it, but it was long before things like campgrounds became important to us. Or mountains with pulling such a big load. Rob’s truck dropped an injector in/near/around the Alleghany Mountains (or maybe the Appalachians or maybe just really big hills – we’re not even sure where we are!!) and that’s going to be an expensive fix.

The campgrounds here are few and far between and the ones that do exist can’t fit decent-sized fifth wheels. And then there’s those that don’t exist…such as the one we found in a campground guide in Beckley. No one answered the phone there, but it was after 6pm on a Saturday, so we decided to just show up and take our chances because we couldn’t find anything else. We followed the directions to a tee, found a new sports complex in its place, and us down a narrow dead-end road. This is a big problem with a large rig!! It was getting dark at this point and Rob could either back up for over half a mile or try and swing around off the road. He chose to swing around, couldn’t see part of a gate sticking out in the dark, and definitely made contact with the rear bumper of the fifth wheel. We have suffered our first casualty, luckily just cosmetic and minor in the scheme of the things. It will be a big reminder of this state, which right now ranks as our least favorite! It was a rough day.

A much-longer story heavily abbreviated, we spent the night in a Wal-Mart parking lot! I never thought those words would come out of my mouth, but there you have it. Wal-Marts are known to be RV-friendly and before the night was over, three more fifth wheels/travel trailers joined us, as did a semi.

And we learned yet another important lesson today: we can’t live by the seat of our pants quite as much as we thought with kids and a fifth wheel! We absolutely have to have a plan. So, before leaving this morning, we’ve already booked our spot for tonight and the rest of the week. Destination: Richmond, Virginia, approximately 250 miles away. It’s a big enough city that hopefully we can get the truck fixed with no problem…now just to nurse it along that far!