Y’all. I don’t even know where to start.
When I was typing last night about us being alone in the Monongahela, I was sort of excited about it. Like, living in Greenville we are always, ALWAYS, near other people. So being alone, truly alone, without another soul around for a literal mile, is glorious.
But, then around 11:30 we heard scratching on the sides of the teardrop that woke us both from a deep sleep. Just like scratch, scratch, scratch. It would stop for a few minutes and then start again. We both wondered what in the world we were supposed to do about a bear and told ourselves that we were all safe inside our wood box (teardrop). We quickly ruled out the fact that it was either of the dogs as they both were quite still and weren’t moving at all and weren’t near enough to anything to scratch it. Then as the scratching continued we realized that it was the sound of scratching against metal and that the dogs weren’t near the doors of the teardrop, the only metal they would be able to scratch from the inside and realized that the scratching had to be coming from outside.
Y’all I was so scared and so excited at the same time. I kept going back and forth between thinking, “We are so alone, what in the world are we supposed to do about a bear?” and “Oh em gee, there’s a real, live, actual bear outside right now, how cool!”
So we were finally able to get some more sleep as we realized that whatever was scratching had moved on and when we got up the next morning and looked around the teardrop on the back end near the galley was the nose print of a bear!
Once we finally got over our bear scare, we managed to have French toast for breakfast since we had a little more time before we had to leave this morning. We attempted to stop in Snowshoe for lunch and to talk around the shops, but that place is completely seasonal and really only worth going in the winter. Nothing at all seemed open and the only parking available to us was a day visitor parking lot, a mile from everything else.
We kept driving a while longer and made it to our campsite at Blackwater Falls State Park. The campground is nice enough, but mostly we’re glad that they have laundry machines and hot showers. We’re on to Spruce Knob Lake Campground tomorrow and Spruce Knob, the highest point in WV. But not after a few more rounds of gin rummy.
Life in the right lane,
Rachel
DMG Exploration 