Traveling West Virginia: Country Roads

After leaving Stonewall Resort we decided to take a different route home. Why go the same way when there are so many options to explore? We could have:

*taken interstates all the way to Ripley, our closest town.
*explored a road I drove last fall to find the church with the Irish graves.
*driven up Gassaway/Rosedale Road where the German church is, and back to Route 33
*gone the familiar route of Route 16 which also ends up on Route 33
*taken the interstate to Clendenin and then up Route 119 to Route 33

We did none of those. I had always wondered where Servia Road would take us, so we decided to find out. According to the map this road would take us to Route 16, and from there back to Route 33.

We headed south on Route 19 first through Walkersville, taking a short jog over to Crawford, WV to check out a place that had been for sale for quite a while. It was an older house that came with a separate former country store building. How perfect that kind of setup would be for us, right? But there was no for sale sign that we could see and it was hard to see which house went with the store. Still, it was such a quaint little community, a cluster of older homes and the store at a small crossroads.

We also stopped at one of my favorite places, Falls Mills.

The water was very muddy. There had been a storm the night before that missed where we were staying, but apparently hit hard enough somewhere to cause some heavy runoff. There is a lot a gasline-building activity in this area as well as all over our state and this is causing so much erosion and runoff as these lines run straight up and down the mountains and there is a lot of raw, exposed earth. I believe there will be significant flooding caused by so much silt getting into our rivers and streams.

We got on the interstate for a short stretch and then took the exit for Servia Road. The road was two-lane for a while, but narrowed after a few miles. The rest of the story can be told in photos.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.