Take Me Home, Interstate Highways

Our West Virginia trip was wonderful (if not so wild, and too short!) Of course the best part was getting to see my aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Some other highlights:

The new tourist attraction in Wheeling, believe it or not, is a Cabela's store. (They have a new exit named Cabela Drive, the road leading to it is named after the store founders, their logo is on the water tower -- amazing. Capitalism in action.)

It's an outdoor outfitter, lots of hunting supplies and the like, originally based in Maine. I was a bit skeptical about a store being an "attraction", but this place is really something. Part of it is like a natural history museum, with animal dioramas (bears, sheep, even an elephant!), and even an aquarium. They had a laser shooting range, a restaurant, and (the day we were there), a beer-can chicken cooking demonstration.

They also had a gift department. (If you're into Labradors, Cabela's is the place for you.) But perhaps the most hilarious was the stuffed animal taxidermy, pictured here.

There's a scene in the movie Walk the Line (great movie, by the way) that allegedly takes place in Wheeling. They're doing a show at the Capitol theater, and later, a woman beretes June in a Woolworths for not upholding the Christian values of her parents. Johnny Cash is there as well, and she invites him to go fishing at a nearby lake. The scene is off for two reasons. First, there's no lake anywhere around there; you don't have to be a country girl to tell the difference between a lake and the Ohio River. And second, Wheeling has never struck me as the kind of place where people would be that rude.

Like too many businesses in Wheeling, the Capitol is closed now. But we went by the outside of it and saw Johnny Cash's star in the sidewalk, and we got a peek into the lobby as well.

Wheeling is quite close to the Ohio border. Since our brother-in-law had never been to Ohio (can you believe that?), we took a walk over. Of course, it started to rain almost as soon as we got there, so we hung out below the underpass to wait for the rain to stop. (Yep, that's us, nothing but class.) My aunt showed up with the car, but there wasn't room for all of us, so Adrian and Mike decided they would just walk. The rest of us piled in. My aunt had brought some umbrellas in the car, so as we drove by the guys, we slowed down (in the middle of the bridge, no less), and passed the umbrellas out the window to them: "Grab them! Grab them!" and then drove off. It was so funny. We can only imagine what the people behind us must have thought. ("Boy, those people from Florida are really nice!")

Of course, we also had to walk across the suspension bridge. (For a few brief shining moments in the mid-1800s, it was the longest one in the world.) When I was growing up, the pedestrian walk was just a grate, so when you looked down, you could see the river rushing right below your feet. They've got it a little more covered up now, but the road part is still just a grate, so you can see how it used to be.


We were also able to see the last part of one of my cousin's city league softball games. Little did we know that when we arrived, they were tied. (The game ended up going ten innings.) My cousin was up to bat with two outs, but they made it work and got three runs in that inning for the win.

We went to Oglebay Park, and in another blast from the past, rode the paddleboats. They've updated the paddleboats since I was a kid (probably for the best, since the old ones would have been pretty ancient by now). They're sparkly and blue and best of all, have four seats instead of just two! That means some people have the option to just be passengers.

We also saw a free concert there, by a cover band called "Reeling the Years." They mentioned that they had played to a crowd of eight people the previous week at a Pottery Festival. Despite that, they were actually very good! And the timing worked fairly well for them, too -- it was raining before they set up, and just as they finished the last song, it started pouring down rain again. (And of course, all those umbrellas were in the car where they didn't do us any good. Oh well!)