Other States

Exploring various other places outside of New York State, including Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

New Market Gap

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I had though I had driven across New Market Gap on the East Lee Highway when I was in Virignia but I have not. It looks like it's a good place to find a lot of hairpin burns and congested highways between Luray and New Market.

Island Line Trail

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The Island Line Trail, also known as the Colchester Causeway, is a 14-mile (23 km) rail trail located in northwest Vermont. It comprises the Burlington Bike Path (Burlington), Colchester Park (Colchester) and the Allen Point Access Area (South Hero).

There was little on-line traffic left on that portion of the route and freight for Canada could be routed from Burlington north to Montreal over the somewhat longer Central Vermont Railway through St. Albans, Vermont. After several years of inactivity, restoring service on the Island Line would have required extensive rebuilding, and renovations of the three swing bridges on the line, over various bays of Lake Champlain. Ultimately all of the bridges on the route were removed, but the roadbed on the causeway across the lake survived, as it was heavily built with much use of granite. The alignment along the shores of Lake Champlain from Burlington Union Station north to the causeway was converted to form the Burlington Bike Path, and later took the Island Line name when the causeway was reopened, with a seasonal bike-ferry replacing the swing bridge in the northern portion of the causeway alignment. Due to a 200-foot (61 m) gap in the causeway, the organization Local Motion operates the Island Line Bike Ferry to shuttle cyclists across the gap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Line_Trail
https://www.localmotion.org/island_line_trail_map

West Virginia for Living?

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West Virginia is one of many charming states with a lot of good rural land to explore. I’ve certainly enjoyed my road trips down there, and I will probably go back there this autumn. There is are two off-grid living channel I follow on the Youtube, and it’s wild and wonderful down there.

But I’m not sure I would choose the state to live in. For one, the summers are brutally hot even in the mountains and the winters are cold and icy. The roads are often steep, twisty and narrow which makes vacation fun, but probably not so fun when they are covered with ice and snow and you have to get other places.

The politics are strange in the state, while the people are friendly some of the laws are not. I am no fan of the idiotic boosterism for coal energy, that is literally tearing apart the land and leaving it with massive heaps of coal waste, ruining trout streams, and fouling with air with emissions — to say nothing of accelerating the harm of climate chgnage. Scrubbers help, but even the most basic of controls are often resisted at local levels, because coal is so uneconomic at this point compared to other generating plants and renewables.

West Virginia gun laws are good, but in many rural parts of state shopping opportunities are quite limited with even Walmart a distant trip away. Hunting and fishing opportunities are pretty good, especially in the mountain area around the National Forest are great. Restrictions on trash burning, and mandatory trash pick up go against my desire to live as close to zero-waste and zero-landfill as possible, reducing and managing the remaining waste by composting, reuse and burning on my own land.

Most people who live in West Virginia, especially rural West Virginia will tell you, they would never want to leave it — as it is truly is almost heaven. But the truth is, opportunities to make a decent living, outside of the dwindling jobs in the coal industry, is pretty darn hard.

Corn In The Sweedlin Valley