Saturday, February 18, 2023- Heading South

     Almost immediately after we posted last night's blog, Abby got sick.  She had been very fussy because she was refusing to go to sleep in the car.  She got to crying and coughing and eventually threw up a little.  It was a long night after that, as we wondered if we should continue, but a (reasonably) good night's sleep made her a different person in the morning.  Julie said we should push on.  We were on the road before 8:30.

     In the parking lot of the hotel, Julie found a $20 bill, and that later paid for lunch for us at Long John Silver's in West Virginia.  We also took a bit of a break at the New River Gorge Bridge.  The bridge is the longest single span steel arch bridge when it was built and was pictured on the West Virginia quarter in 2005.  Julie had already started to drive across it and Scott said that he had wanted to go to the overlook to see it, so we got turned around and went back over it.  There is a National Park Service visitor center at the northern end of the bridge and we looked around at the exhibits, the gift shop, and the scenery out the large windows.  The canyon at that point is so deep that a Washington Monument and two Statues of Liberty could be stacked on top of each other with room left over underneath the bridge.  Scott went out on a wooden walkway to get another scenic look at the bridge.  After we drove across the bridge a third time, we continued on the long leg of the trip through West Virginia.  We exited the state and entered Virginia by crossing through the East River Mountain Tunnel.  We also went through the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel near Wytheville, Virginia.  Abby likes tunnels.

     We got a little confused as we pulled off the main road in Troutman, North Carolina, to try to find dinner.  Julie had two GPS programs on her phone that were telling her conflicting directions to two different destinations, but we eventually found a nice but busy little diner that the locals seemed to like.  We got into a traffic jam in Charlotte after dark.  Abby had been fighting going to sleep all day and hadn't even taken a nap, but she finally succumbed  to sleep at about 7:30.   We decided to press onward and go a little farther today in order to have a shorter trip tomorrow.  It was about 11:00 when we pulled into a hotel at Hardeeville, SC, near Savannah, GA.  With about four and a half hours left to drive, we could have lunch at Disney tomorrow!