Day 1 - Saturday, March 19 - Home to Wheeling, WV

Starting mileage:  76538 Starting time: 8:45 am
Ending mileage: 77007 Ending time: 4:45 pm
Travel mileage:  469 Travel time: 8:00 hours

We don't have plans to do any particularly interesting things on the drive out this time. But maybe we will find something along the way. I like to keep a blog so we look back at it later to refresh our failing memory.

We had mostly packed the car the day before because rain had been forecast for today. It was only misting lightly and 50 degrees this morning. It didn't take long to finish up organizing the house, turning the water off, etc, before putting our cooler and suitcases in the car.

It was a mix of rain and sun off and on all the way to West Virginia with temperatures 60-75. We stopped at a Subway restaurant in Altoona, PA for lunch.

Gas was $4.49 when we entered Pennsylvania and $4.29 by the time we needed gas in western Pennsylvania. We signed up for a Sheetz loyalty card which gives us an extra 3 cents off, no big deal. Speedway is giving us 15 cents off for the first 60 days. When we left Kingston this morning, gas was $3.99 at a few gas stations.

We are staying at a Comfort Inn in Tridelphia, WV, just a few miles east of Wheeling. $97/night.

The hotel is very obviously used mainly by oil or gas workers. The parking lot is filled with Halliburton trucks pulling trailers with what looks like fracking sand. The hotel breakfast starts at 4am! A worker I spoke with said it takes an hour or more to get to the work site and they need to be there by 6am.

We  thought we would visit the Historic Wheeling District on the Wheeling Island in the middle of the Ohio River for sightseeing and dinner but it was a sad disappointment. There were many grand Victorian homes but many were run down. The only restaurants other than KFC and Burger King were a couple seedy-looking dives. 

When we went back to the business district, there were huge crowds of people and a long traffic jam for people going to the arena for the event which I later found out was PBR (professional bull-riding) finals. We didn't have any luck finding a restaurant there as it was a typical dead business area on a Saturday night.

We ended up going to a Japanese fusion restaurant in an immense suburban shopping complex not far from the hotel. The food was good although our waitress with a Japanese-sounding name was actually from the Philippines.



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