Take Me Home Country Roads

Wild and Wonderful

We returned recently from a 10 day trip to visit my family in eastern Pennsylvania and Susan’s family in western Pennsylvania.

It’s always great to visit family and we got to do some great stuff like riding my niece Riley’s pony Marshmallow.

and taking a ride on a historic steam engine through Lancaster County’s farmland at Strasburg Railroad

but upon crossing the WV line the word’s of the late John Denver in West Virginia’s state anthem rang true.  While it would always be nice to be closer to our families here’s a few reasons we’re glad to be living in and helping to preserve the Mountain State, the only state entirely within Appalachia:

• Even the highways often feel like byways.  You can go for miles and see nothing but trees, no neon billboards like this or other flashy, obnoxious advertisements that litter many highways in other states.
• 80% of the state is forested so I can challenge myself trying to identify tree species while driving
• I can still hear quiet here.  Well, that was, until my house was brought into the flight path of numerous ultralight aircraft and helicopter tours.  Fortunately they’re not too ubiquitous yet.
• There’s only 1.8 million people in the whole state.  That’s about half as many as live in Chicago.
• I can’t remember ever sitting in a traffic jam in Fayetteville.
• Stars.  We can see ‘um.
• I get to open the door to my office and listen to woodpeckers

Tags: green travel, strasburg railroad, West Virginia

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Blog, TGA's Travelogues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.