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Mid-Atlantic Vacation Blog
After almost a mile of climbing mostly down steps like these, we would end up under the bridge itself. However, New River Gorge Bridge is over half a mile long and it's supports are placed in wooden areas, so we couldn't really see much of the bridge itself, but we could get a sense of how large it is:
And if that looks tall, just realize that our hike didn't get us anywhere near the bottom of the gorge, so this is a view from some of the short support beams.
After we both snapped a lot of pictures (I'm pretty sure that Brooke shot the two pictures above on our new little camera), we began the long climb back to our car so we could get on with our travels. We did make time to stop for some cheesy souvenirs (we did find a store) and we took a winding, hilly road back to the interstate and on to Richmond, Virginia to see the IndyCar race that night.
As for the race itself, I think we had more drama finding the track than there was in the actual race (other than the drama of whether or not Brooke would hang herself out of boredom). We followed all of the signs, but we foudn it odd that there was virtually no traffic heading to the track only 30 minutes before the race. I began thinking that we would be the only people there or that I had picked the wrong date. However, we did find the correct entrance and saw a few hundred other cars, but when we walked to the gate, we saw tons of other people, so we might have just found the back entrance and didn't know it. We lucked out again, it appeared (and parking was free too)! The race had some pretty cool pre-race ceremonies with some skydivers and some sort of military fly-by during the national anthem (a plane flew over the main straightaway and made a hard 90-degree left turn directly over the track; it was like nothing I've ever seen). The race was about to get going, but right as the green flag flew, driver Sam Hornish, Jr. had his car pointing the wrong way (look in the bottom left of the picture):
Anyway, after that little excitement, there was little excitement. Dario Franchitti started from the pole position and was virtually unchallenged for the entire race, which only lasted 90 minutes. I watched some of the other racing going one between other drivers and that was interesting, but I was more thankful that Brooke didn't collapse from boredom because I had to admit that it was a dull race. At least at the end of the race there was a cool fireworks show:
Speaking of fireworks, we hadn't planned on doing anything else that evening after we got back to the hotel, but after I got about halfway through this blog entry, I heard the loudest noise I think I've evere heard (outside of the building at Brylane), which is really ironic because we bought earplugs at the race track because of the noise of the race cars. Anyway, the fire alarm in the hotel went off around 12:45 a.m. It definitely got our attention, but and we instinctively went to the fire exit just like we did in grade school. We didn't see any fire, but about 5 minutes later, we saw two fire trucks arrive. As we waited outside, we could see water falling alongside the building from one of the rooms on the same floor as ours. Sure enough, when we got back in, we saw that the sprinkler had gone off in a room across the hall from ours and only 2 or 3 rooms down and the floor was soaked. We don't know why the sprinkler went off, but I am thinking that now might be a good time for me to start copying all of my pictures from this trip to CDs in case the same thing happens in our room.
Anyway, we are still on vacation and tomorrow we will be heading towards Williamsburg. Brooke was looking up information on things we could to tomorrow and discovered that there are two Jamestowns: Historic Jamestowne, the actual site of the original Jamestown, run by the U.S. Parks Department, and Jamestown Settlement, a recreation of the colony. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the colony (it is noted on the current Virginia license plate), so there could be festivals going on that we might attend tomorrow...er, later today, I guess.
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