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Paoli, IN - Lewisburg, WV
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We left Paoli (and soon Indiana) at 10:00 AM ... we overslept again. (I hope you are enjoying the website, because we worked until 2:00 PM to upload it.) We stopped in a cute cottage for breakfast ... I never want to have pancakes for breakfast again in my life. Or hash browns with over-easy eggs. The place looked like an old family house turned into a lounge, and it seems a favorite for local people. Of course, we felt like if everybody were looking at us.
We crossed Kentucky and West Virginia in one day, passing by Louisville (huge!), Lexington and Charleston (great capitol). It was another of those non-stop days. Well, almost non-stop. We found a K-Mart in Huntington, WV, and Roberto wanted to get a pair of sneakers. He found these sneakers two years ago in another K-Mart and he loves them, so he wanted to buy another pair exactly like those. Surprisingly, we found them ... and left K-Mart with a total of four pair of shoes. These, added to the other two pairs we bought in Missouri, make six pair of shoes in three days. It is a record.
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I was very interested in Kentucky, because I have always heard of the Kentucky Derby ... and because I was a fan of the Daniel Boone series, from the seventies. In fact, we saw several houses with the typical white fence of horse breeders, and many roads and historical markers named after Daniel Boone. We also saw tobacco plantations, with the distinguished huge leaves ranging from green to golden.
In West Virginia we have a fist real taste of an Appalachian thunderstorm. For no more than 20 minutes, but it was fierce. The roads here are particularly beautiful, with forests and large rivers, falls and parks. Roberto loved the curves of route 60; they reminded me of the road between São Marcos and Caxias do Sul, in Brazil, and I never enjoyed the feeling that a wrong turn can take you to the bottom of the river. I pass.
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What was impressing to me in both West Virginia and Kentucky was the amount of mobile homes and trailer cities we saw on the road. Granted, we saw many houses that looked like Tara in Gone with the Wind, dominated the landscape from the top of a hill or in the middle of a tobacco plantation. But we saw many, many cities made almost exclusively of mobile homes, really rundown houses, with poor, barefoot children playing not too far away from the road. I have seen poverty in the inner cities of America, and in the many areas where minorities (Hispanics and blacks) live. But it was odd to see poverty in a rich, productive land, a setting that is so similar to many affluent suburbs and agricultural areas.
In the middle of the trailer cities and some shacks, we also saw these immense industrial plants and piles of coal in West Virginia. Sometimes outdoors reminded us that we are in the middle of a very divisive political race, and that the retirement plans of coal plant workers are discusses as passionately as the war.
Tomorrow we should get to Williamsburg. I just want to sleep in the same bed for two days in a row.
Lise
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