While I will be traveling through at least another half dozen or so states on this trip, I am done adding new ones to my roster, with West Virginia being the first state to officially herald that I am back east and nearly in familiar territory.

I woke up feeling slightly disoriented this morning because of the time change. Guess what, you can get jet lag when traveling overland! 🙂

I pulled out of the Cracker Barrel at 7:45 and rolled into the nearest rest area (Midway) at 8:15. By 8:20, the kettle was on, the French press was ready, and my email was downloading. How did I ever manage in my early days of RVing when getting down to actually living in my rig was a treat reserved for when I was spending at least two nights on full hookups?!

That said, it’s amazing what can happen in a half hour. I swear my front door was whole when I left Shelbyville. What the heck happened to it?!

Can you see it? Here’s a closeup:

Not to self: find a new window frame for the front door. Anyway, what’s left is solid and the window is secure, so I can deal with this when I arrive in Virginia.

Having only about four hours to drive today, including stops, and having only three and a half or so left, I decided to spend the bulk of the day at the rest area catching up on some things. I enjoyed this bucolic view out of my office window today:

I stayed until just past two, taking the time to charge everything under the sun (literally) since I had more than 6A coming in from the solar panel:

There is nothing like a fully charged battery to make a boondocker happy!

Before leaving the rest area, I did something unprecedented: I remembered that I was out of windshield wiper fluid and actually topped it up. I usually remember these things when I get splashed with mud and am blinded. 🙂 The bugs on this trip have been nasty!!!

From Midway, it was then a rather windy but otherwise easy drive out of Kentucky into West Virginia:

I passed an amazon.com facility:

I took advantage of the fact that I am going to be in the US for a bit longer to use my latest Amazon rewards to get a ton of stuff that is being shipped to my friend’s place. I wonder if some of it is shipping out of here?

From there, it was just a few miles to where I am parked for the night, the Walmart in Cross Lanes (according to Google) or Charleston (according to my GPS). There are ‘no RV parking signs’ in the lot, but was told that that’s just to encourage folks to come into customer service and be directed to the proper part of the lot to park. You actually park as far from the Walmart as possible in front of the discount store and against Nitro Boulevard. When looking at Nitro, you need to park across from the Dollar Tree, not the Loews.

Well, the pizza I have in the oven is calling my name. It’s going to taste pretty good with the cold beer I just opened. 🙂