Close call

We left the ashtray in Pearisburg (our hotel), and stopped for some breakfast. We met a guy who picked off our Vermont tags and asked how we liked our Senator Sanders. I was ready for the usual "socialist rant" but this guy liked Bernie a lot. "Not a Republican or a Democrat". Wow, go Bernie. If you can impress these southern boys, you must be on the right track..

We headed east toward Blacksburg and then north through more lonely, smooth roads. For the first time we saw actual working farms in the valleys between the ridges. Beef, Holsteins (dairy) and hay (presumably for horses). We had the roads to ourselves, except for the critters. The first wake up call was a woodchuck who's trajectory according to my trigonometry calcs should have intercepted the leading edge of my new Bridgestone tires and resulted in me hitting him between the third and 4th rib bone on his port side. I missed and then realized I got a C in trig so..

The second incident was really scary. I was following Dave doing about 50 when I just caught sight of a deer about 2 feet in front of me. I could hear his hoves scratching the pavement to get by. If I had hit him, I would not even have had time to put my fingers on the brakes. So I guess hitting deer is just a fate thing.

We actually saw a lot of deer in these last couple of days and again the radios are nice for warning the guy behind.

We stopped for lunch in a tiny town at a corner store that had gas but no high-test so we put in the more pingy stuff (which worked fine). One kid was running the cash register, pumps and deli and was busy but cool as a cucumber. We chatted with and older couple who raved about how nice West Virginia was. His comment was that "West Virginia is wasted on the West Virginians". So I guess the inter-state animosity thing is here as well. After things settled down (the lunch crowd of 3 had finished), we got talking to him about maple syrup because he was selling Virginia maple syrup. He said he had helped a neighbor this year and they set 2000 taps. The sap ran from mid February to mid-March and it was mostly B. His wife had come in pregnant with a head covering and after noticing the brochures about Mennonites, we realized, this was a Mennonite couple and I would guess this valley had a small community of them. Again, really nice guy.

I kept thinking that as we pushed north into PA, the nice back roads would start tapering off but we saw no shortage today.

We zipped through Maryland (pretty narrow part here) and pulled into Bedford, PA. We stopped at a motel and got a clean room for $34.00, the cheapest room yet but clean. Yet another motel owned by an Indian (not the American type) family. Very nice.

We got dinner at a local restaurant where a girls softball team had just won a game (they were all smiling) so it was family night for dinner.

We are shooting to get back Wednesday night so I can say good bye to my daughter Hannah Thursday morning when her plane leaves for California (summer job). We have a couple long days ahead.