The park groundskeeper woke me up New Martinsville, WV, he seemed like he wanted to talk about where we were from but it was really awkward trying to have a conversation with him. All our stuff was soaked from the night before; we tried to dry some stuff out but didn't really want to spend the time.
We rode out of town on SR 20; it was infested with coal trucks. The roads were a good surface but didn't have much in the way of a shoulder. If you had to find a nice thing about the coal trucks it'd be that they hold up just about all the traffic going up the hill behind them. Then you got to enjoy the When you hear one of them coming you get off and five other cars would pass you but you wouldn't see another car
Stopping to talk to the guy at the propane shipping plant.
Breakfast bought for us by a nice old man who wouldn.t let me take his picture, and kept saying "I gotta hand it to you" and "I take my hat off too you" "Breakfast is paid for" Super cute waitress
As we were sitting on the side of the road having a sandwich in celebration of mile 45 for the day a pickup truck slows past us and then goes into reverse. It stopped and out stepped a skinny little cowboy guy with a bunch of gray stubble, blue jeans, mesh backed ball cap, and a short sleeved button up shirt. Out of his mouth came a string of profanities that ended in "bikes" Brad and I looked up at each other from our peanut butter sandwiches not sure what to make of this. I'd love to relate some of the dialog but most of it involved enough profanity to make me uncomfortable. He talked about himself a bunch and in between asked us the standards questions. My initial suspicions about him being a bit drunk were confirmed when he motioned for me to hold on in the middle of telling us how nice everyone was in West Virginia. He returned from his truck with a beer. I though he might be planning to give us, nope he opened it and started drinking it. Our hopes of getting rid of him quickly were diminishing. He grabbed a handful of our pretzels that looked like they.d go nicely with his beer and settled in for the long haul. Our only hope was to pack up from underneath him. The only problem with that plan was then we'd have a drunken West Virginian swerving past us a little bit farther down the road. He asked us what we did for showers, and I made the mistake of mentioning that the last one I'd had was in Indiana. He immediately told us that we should stop by his brand new 5 bedroom house that he'd just got done telling us about in extreme detail. He gave us directions on how to get there all we had to do was come up with a reason we couldn't stop there.
He told us there wasn't anything "funny" about him causing a bunch of nervous laughter and foot staring
We rode off hoping that.d when he passed us it'd be the last we ever saw of him. Unfortunately he was waiting for us at the turn. I rode up and told him that we didn't have time to go by his house. He got a bit upset, insisting that this was the fastest road to Clarksburg, WV. I told him that I'd go talk to Brad and see what he though just trying to get rid of him.
In Clarksburg, WV I went into a gas station to get directions to a campground. They didn't know where one was but they had a box of 12 ice cream sandwiches on sale for $2.20. We sat out front giving as many away as we could while asking for directions to a campsite. Again no luck
Got out of town and were too chicken ask people if we could camp on their land so we just pushed into the grass in a field
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