Day 14 - Tues, 7/27

Today it was the remainder of Pennsylvania, then a bit of Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia - to a Comfort Inn near the outskirts of Roanoke. More tree covered mountains along rural roads that curve through valleys, dive down narrow hollows. I am struck by how much of the country is still forested. I imagine creatures, some with four legs, some with two, hiding just out of sight in the woods watching us speed past in the silver car - whispering, "Here they come; there they go." I can almost see their eyes.

Bob has another vision - of marauding old people in tour buses roaming the North East. Sometimes competing groups fight over choice viewing places, over spots in cafeteria serving lines. (This on Cape Breton - they were all over the place.) We speculate that press gangs of old people are after us, that they will get us and put us on one of their buses - a perambulatory purgatory.



(Me on one of the walkways through Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water - which he designed for the Kaufmann family near Somerset in Western PA. )


(Bob and Sara visited this place - in the BMW I think. It was one of their many car trips. While we followed our knowledgeable and pleasant guide and I asked a few questions Bob stayed a little to one side and remembered being here with Sara and her wonder at the place. He said that after they left she was very quiet and later when they got home he would catch her paging though her Falling Water book. Sara imparted lore gathered on their trips to the children she taught back in SC.)


(Wright gradually reduced the height of the walls around these cantilevered concrete patios. Done to trick the eye the design would have made it easy for someone to take an artistic header into the rocks below. )



A covered bridge near the little town of Shanksville, PA. We were looking for the Flight 93 National Memorial which according to Bob's Michelin map was supposed to be nearby. Two ladies walking and working near the two-lane back road verified that there is a memorial. We saw a couple of signs and a rusted angel near a field which looked like a place where a plane might have gone down. That's all. But we did see this bridge and we did on a whim decided to go to Falling Water. As Bob said, "We are 30 miles from it and you'll never get here again in your life."



(Supporting structure in the bridge and a bit of graffiti announcing that "weed is good".)


(On the way to find the place where Flight 93 went down we encountered ridges populated by huge windmills. We saw them periodically throughout rural PA.)