ShawneeDispatch.com

A few weeks ago in this space I mentioned my plans to make our recent auto trip to Virginia more interesting.

The idea was to get off the interstates and see some of the country from what the writer William Least Heat-Moon called the “blue highways.”

The interstate highways, those broad, multilane thoroughfares that connect the major cities of our nation, provide an efficient, safe means of getting from Point A to Point B. But traversing the country on them can be a pretty dull exercise.

If you’re driving through the Rockies or the Alleghenies or the Blue Ridge mountains, you can, of course, take in the far view. But you miss much of the feel of the country – the view from a farmer’s driveway or from the highway’s intersection with a rutted little country road that meanders off into tantalizing regions of the imagination.

The engineers who designed the interstates specified that trees and other obstructions were to be removed back a certain distance from the road. That’s great if all you want to look at is what’s on the road, but it tends to strip away much of the local flavor. To some extent, driving through Kansas isn’t much different than driving through Kentucky. That, presumably, was the goal.

But to really capture the flavor of a place you need to get off the freeway, down on a two-lane road with driveways that come right up to the road, with fences right beside the ditches and great trees whose sinewy branches dapple the sunlight that flashes on your windshield as you drive along.

I can, alas, report only modest success. On the way back East we were anxious to get where we were going – the goal, after all, was to go see our daughter and our grandson, not to see the country. That pretty much dictated that we stay on task – on the interstate.

Coming back, however, we had a little more flexibility. I scheduled our return trip to allow some “blue highway” touring.

The first segment was the Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park. This 105-mile route from Front Royal to Rockfish Gap, Va., wanders along the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains, from hogback to pinnacle.

The guidebooks extol its splendid views from precipitous overlooks, and I can verify that many of them are stunning. Unfortunately, it was cloudy the day we were there, and rather than being under the clouds we were in them, meaning that the impact of the view was lost to us as it was all we could do to see 50 feet ahead much of the time. Thankfully there was little traffic. As soon as it was practical to do so, we found one of the east-west roads bisecting the park and beat it back to the interstate.

The next day we enjoyed our one success. From White Sulphur Springs to Charleston we drove through much of the heartland of West Virginia on a route known as the Midland Trail, 115 miles of twisting, turning mostly two-lane highway up and down mountains and along the Kanawha River.

Most of the road twists and turns through hilly country, but there is one exhilarating pitch over Sewell Mountain, complete with several switchbacks. Watch out for the logging trucks. As the guidebooks say, the town of Rainelle was once home to the world’s largest hardwood mill.

At Hawk’s Nest State Park, a short walk reveals a great view of the New River Gorge. A few miles later, the New and Gauley rivers join to form the Kanawha. For several miles the road follows the river through a series of villages with riverside homes. Finally, the route ends at Charleston, site of West Virginia’s gold-domed state capitol.

It was an exhilarating drive through beautiful country. I can’t wait for another.