John Denver’s immortal song about West Virginia, a state that we have spent the day crossing!

Day four of driving and I have to give a shout out to my Darling husband for spending four solid days behind the wheel covering over 1,500 miles to get us to our first, real destination of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

We are out of harm’s way of Hurricane Florence, although we may get some rain and winds once the storm makes landfall and, of course, we will monitor the storm’s impact to ensure our future plans do not need to be tweaked!

West Virginia is a beautiful state, located in the Appalachian region in the Southern United States which has an unrealistic, long-term future with its main natural resource, coal!

The state is blessed with an extremely high-quality coal that was first discovered in 1742, yet in recent times, as with all coal-producers around the world, the energy source is not in high demand and it’s long-term prospects, until they can find a way of economically cleaning-up its climatic impact, it’s an industry that will not see the light of day down the road.

These days, even though a starting salary in the coal industry is $60,000 a year, the state has expanded it outputs to include broilers (young chickens), beef, chicken, eggs, dairy produce plus turkeys, sheep, lambs and farm-raised fish!

 

A typical view of West Virginia.