Woke up early today before sunrise. Gayla worked on some client projects and I did an activation of this POTA park US-0696. Made coffee and now packed up to play touristy stuff today.
We left camp at 10:03 AM headed back to the New River Gorge Visitor Center. Once on arrival we had a snack and let the dogs out. We packed our backpack with some water and camera gear. Walked down 175 stairs to go see this bridge.
This walk was pretty cool. It gets you closer to the bridge to see how massive it really is. It’s huge. Built in 1977.
Gayla wanted to do an auto tour to go down to the bottom of the gorge. This was the original route to get across until the New River Bridge was built in 77. This was twisty, curvy, hilly winding road. It’s a 45 minute drive for 8 miles. Clifford did great going down and up. There was a height limit of 12 feet. We were 11’6” tall to the top of our antennas.
So many things to see. Waterfalls and a train tracks and crazy kayaking people. It was great.
After the auto tour, Gayla wanted to go to abandoned ghost town of Thurmond, West Virginia. It was a busy town back in the day with trains and banks and a hotel. This was also the narrowest road that I drove Clifford on with oncoming traffic. Luckily most people got scared and pulled over to let us go by. Then we got to the ghost town and had to cross a narrow bridge with the train tracks on the same bridge. A bit nerve racking but people were gawking that we were driving an ambulance across it.
We got out and walked around the town and took several pictures of it. Then of course we had to go back out the way we came in. It wasn’t that bad.
From there we made our way back to the Army Campground where we stayed last night. There are 11 free campsites here at this place and a pretty decent view of the sky for Starlink to work because we have absolutely no cellular service here at all.
We made supper and sat outside in the nice sunny late afternoon.
Gayla called it an early night and I did a bit more ham radio around 8pm this evening.
75-ish miles driven today. I forgot to hit record that one time.
