Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

State: Kentucky
City: Morehead

Today was a hardcore driving day. Since we hadn’t even made it out of Virginia the day before, we had a lot of land to cover and make up for. We set a 7 hour/400+ mile goal for ourselves. Of course, all of this came after our free continental breakfast during which I gorged myself on bagels, orange juice, poppy seed muffins and coffee. Who can resist something that is free, delicious and filling?

Once breakfast was out of the way, around 9:30am, we set out on the road. It was decided the night before that we’d try a new arrangement with me in the back with the one jittery cat and the other two in the front seat with my mother. We got the cats in place in the car where they got a proper draft from the a/c, shaded from the sun and strapped in as best we could with the seatbelts. It was all pretty good at first. Our plan was to continue down I-81 S to 77 N and then continue on until we hit I-64W again.

We went through Lexington first and saw a really neat looking drive in theater. It sort of makes me jealous that they still have an active playing drive in here and now back east. I love drive-ins because you can relax in your own car, no babies crying or people kicking the back of your chair. No. Just you and a movie, all alone and comfortably isolated. But still with popcorn. Drive-ins make me feel somewhat nostalgic, too, because one of my clearest memories is going to a drive-in as a mere child to see Hellraiser.

By the time we reached the Appalachian Mountains, my mother and I decided to go through West Virginia to Kentucky and not Tennessee to Kentucky. We could have gone either way, but the thought of looping through Knoxville to find I-75 was daunting. Plus, by going sort of further south and catching I-64 W by 77 N meant that we skirted the largest peaks of the mountains. I was glad for this because the mountains, as you know from my last post, were starting to get to me. I was in an almost constant state of alarm because I felt so frightened being high, staring down at drops that no one could possibly ever survive from. After a while, it started to work on my nerves in a bad way.

To be honest, at first I was fine in the car with the way we arranged things. I didn’t mind being in the backseat. However, as time went on, I began to feel increasingly cramped and claustrophobic. The combined and total effect of traveling through the mountains, being in the backseat, feeling stuffed in and confined complete with my only line of vision being to one side was enough to set me into a minor panic attack. I didn’t make an issue of it, I just got out of the car at the first rest stop we stopped at and asked if I could come back up front. There was no way I could make it another 6 hours in the back.

You know, I’ve always heard all of this ‘stuff’ about West Virginia being this really backwards and strange place, but I didn’t see any of that there. Perhaps it was, somewhere buried deep within the mountains and trees, but West Virginia didn’t look any different from the rest of the US. Yet, as I write this, I am reminded of what someone reminded me of earlier: the New Frontier. If you don’t know what that is, I suggest that you look up some of the programs of John F. Kennedy. It will all make sense afterwards.

It was some time out of the mountains when we got to Charleston, which had the most beautiful capitol building, which you could see easily from the interstate. Of course, the big city didn’t last long and soon enough we were going through more miles of land and water.

Small towns would be dotted here and there and we even stopped in at one called Scott Depot so that my mother could get something to drink and have a smoke. It looked really rundown, let me tell you. The station my mother pulled in at was across the street from a playground and school. I asked my mother if we could take a look at it and we did. The school was nothing but a bunch of trailers in close proximity and the playground wasn’t much better. I took a picture of a very scary clown swing set that had all manner of garbage shoved into his gaping mouth.

West Virginia wasn’t that long of a ride. But man does I-77 have a lot of tolls! Just on the stretch we were on, getting in and off of I-64W, we hit three of them (at $1.25 apiece). The entire trip had four tolls in total and three of those four were in West Virginia. We were out of it and into Kentucky before we knew it. It was at least satisfying to know that we’d made it into Kentucky.

We weren’t far into Kentucky when the residual storms from Hurricane Ike blew up through. The winds were enough to start pulling the car from side to side, which any driver knows is both stressful and exhausting. We had all hoped to make better time that day, to get further into Kentucky, at least to Lexington and beyond. The storm winds were against us and it just wasn’t safe to be on the road, especially in terrain that is mountainous. While I don’t think my mother is a poor enough driver that she will send us down the side of a mountain, my tolerance for stress just isn’t equipped to handle scary situations like that so far from sea level.

Our need to get off of the road gave us little option but to pull into the first Days Inn we found. It wasn’t in the best part of town, that’s for sure. Either that or the entire city of Morehead is dilapidated. They did have a Shoney’s with all you can eat steak, so we choked down buffet steak before heading off to the hotel room to watch True Blood on our free HBO.

The best part about Morehead is that across the street was a gas station and liquor store in one. I got a good laugh because of that place.

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