West Virginia

Have you ever paced a place and thought, “wait – I’ve been here before!”? That was my experience when I drove from New York to Southern Virginia in October and passed signs for Harper’s Ferry – while I was in West Virginia.

Now, this might seem like a strange way to start my meaningful experience blog post for West Virginia. Let’s just say, I was very excited to learn that a place I visited with my parents after graduation from Southern Virginia University that I thought was in Virginia was in West Virginia.

Here I was thinking that the most meaningful experience I had in West Virginia was the time that we were lost on our way to the Mormon Temple in Washington D.C. when we stopped multiple times for directions (pre-Smart Phones…back when you still had to stop at a gas station and consult maps). The first time we put one thumb up from the sunroof of the SUV to indicate we now knew which way to go. Each stop added more thumbs up and less confidence from the other cars – but we made it!

As memorable as that experience was (very!) I have had another more meaningful experience in West Virginia.

Harper’s Ferry is a beautiful town nestled into a gorgeous bend where the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers meet. There is a lot of history there. And I bought a book that combined my love of literature and my love for Abraham Lincoln – Lincoln & Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington. Plus it had a bookmark with a penny that had a heart punched out of it :)

On my drive back to New York, I stopped at the West Virginia Visitors Center and talked to the very friendly staff there and had yet another fun experience in West Virginia!