Globetrotting Grandies: Wednesday 13th September 2017

We camped over night at Riffle Run campground on Burnsville Lake and then went to Bulltown for a look around one of the battlegrounds of the civil war. They fought a battle here over the space of 12 hours, brother against brother, fathers against sons. Sad really.

Bulltown was named after an Indian called Captain Bull who killed a lot of white people in the area. Whatever it takes to make you famous I guess.

Thursday 14th September 2017 - Some more West Virginia

We're staying for 5 nights at a lovely State Park in Summersville and will do some exploring in the area

The New River Gorge Bridge is the second largest single span bridge in America and pretty impressive

Down below the bridge

This is the Lost World Cavern at Lewisburg

They also had a good collection of fossils

Next stop was Greenbrier Resort which is one of a few 5 star resorts in America and has a bunker underneath for Congress to go in the case of an emergency

They also had a golf course and a wedding chapel

Here's another only in America, we're driving back from Greenbrier discussing how we need to get some firewood so we can have a camp fire. A pickup with a trailer full of wood pulls up next to us at the traffic lights. We ask him if we can get some wood so he just pulls over and sells us some. He says he has already got the money for the load but still let us have some of it anyway. I guess somebody got diddled. While we are loading the wood a hitch hiker runs up to us as he thinks we stopped to pick him up so we just put him in the back on top of the wood and off we go. It doesn't matter that there is no tail gate on the pickup. Try and get away with that in Australia.

Friday 15th September 2017

Today we went to an Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley

We're going down

The miners did it pretty tough in West Virginia. The company would set up a little town for the workers where they would have to pay rent out of what they earned. They were paid with script which was not legal tender but money that they could only spend in the company town at the company store. They also had to purchase their own tools. They would work 12 hour shifts and their pay was governed by how much stone was in each skip. If there was too much stone they didn't get paid for that load. So in effect they were slaves to the company. No wonder the unions started to form to try and improve their conditions.