What to do when a pandemic has squashed all your international travel plans? (goodbye New Zealand, goodbye Turkey, goodbye Patagonia!) Travel domestically, of course! The month-long furnished rental market has exploded since April, and I've joined the craze, swapping out my place in Boulder for your place in Anywhere Else, America. Come with me (virtually, of course) across the country as I experience all the rural roads, small towns, coastal regions, scrub-filled deserts, and damp, dark forests I might never have visited if not for the altered dynamic of global travel.
My West Virginia days are behind me, and I'm already drafting posts about my new location, but before I move my reader on, I have one final post about the Mountain State. Obviously, I was going to a love a state filled with mountains and mountain roads mountain hikes and mountain adventures. But West Virginia offered many other quirky enjoyments and I'm so glad I ended up there. 1) The crazy roads. The roads of southern West Virginia twist and turn endlessly. You might think, oh, that's only 100 miles away, I'll be there in less than two hours. Nope. Three plus hours later, you feel like you just stepped off a ship adrift in a stormy sea and need to find your land legs again. And in the ice, the possibility of plummeting over an edge is very real, so you'd better have good snow tires. I didn't always understood why the roads had to be so twisty-turvy, but they were. Another little quirk - in some places, there is only a single paved center lane, with a few feet