Livin' in Sin with a Safety Pin

This may not get posted on Friday, but I promise I wrote it on Friday. The wireless connection that I poached with something resembling regularity the last time I was in Cleveland is being a little bitch at the moment and I can’t seem to stay logged on. I may be uploading a couple of posts at a time from the local library or wi-fi friendly bar over the next week’s worth of days unless the linksys router next door decides to play nice and let me join.

And if you’re really slow and didn’t catch this from the title (or first paragraph), I’m in Cleveland, OH. We spent the night in Beckley, WV, last night and went to visit the exhibition coal mine before hitting the road. The coal mine is one that operated from the late 1800s through 1910 and was abandoned before being taken over as a museum in the 1960s and they’ve moved original buildings from various area mining towns from the pre-WWII period to set up a little recreation of what a mining town was like in the first half of the 1900s. Despite coal still being an important part of our everyday lives (most electricity in the US comes from coal-powered plants) most of us couldn’t tell the difference between that and the stuff we put in our grills because we’ve long since stopped using it as a direct household energy source. It’s still cool to get a glimpse of what it would have been like for the miners back when coal deliveries for the furnace or even the fireplace would have been a regular part of our everyday lives.

Oh, and the guides are retired coal miners. In other words, the elderly man who led our tour couldn't walk and talk at the same time without running out of breath. Black lung is apparently rough stuff.

Actually during the first half of the 1900s my people were still entirely wood and mammal powered. They weren’t fancy enough to have furnaces. They really were lucky to be using metal tools. I’m not sure they even got electricity before World War II and I know they didn’t have indoor plumbing by then.

I really wanted to go by Matewan to get a picture with the “Welcome to Matewan” sign even if there was nothing there about the mining town back when it was the scene of a battle between the miners and the hired goons brought in to stop them from unionizing. Unfortunately, Matewan is about as far west as you can go in West Virginia, and would have been a couple of hours out of the way. I guess I can just go to the Great Lakes brewpub that is in the same bar where Eliot Ness was gunned down and get my share of bloody American history that I know more about from the movie than the history books for the trip. I’ve already been there, but the beer is good and you can still find the bullet holes if you know where to look.

Speaking of beer, we stopped at a brewpub in West Virginia just before the border with Ohio. We stopped there because it was dinner time and we were already in the town for the Trans Allegheny Books used book store. The brewpub was a bust. They had six beers on tap instead of the two that Asheville Pizza had, but the beer mostly sucked. I’d rather have two tasty pints than six sucky samples any day. The food wasn’t even really good enough to make up for it, although they do cook up a mean French fry and my hamburger was pretty damn tasty. The book store, on the other had, was a true gem. It’s an old Carnegie library that had been abandoned by the local library and is huge. There are four stories and warrens of rooms packed with used books and unlike most used book stores they actually have the books organized in a recognizable manner. K and I both picked up a couple of paperbacks and if I’d had more time to wander, or had a booklist to guide me, I think we would have left with a lot more dead trees in the car. If you’re ever driving through I-77 through West Virginia on your way to Ohio, this is worth a stop to stretch your legs. The Tamarack arts center back in Beckley was worth a stop as well. It’s a huge center for local artisans and artists and is on a rest stop on I-77. There’s even a small theatre inside the building for performance art. They had a whole section of locally produced wines, but sadly gave no love to the state’s brewing scene. It could have saved me the trouble of stopping at that brewpub today.

The rest of the trip was largely uneventful. The skies were clear for the entire trip for the first time this vacation. We drove through western Ohio, which after the gorgeous mountains we’d spent the last five days passing through, was a bit boring. We rolled into Parma Heights just before 10 p.m. and headed straight for one of K’s and my favorite treats: East Coast Custard. This place makes frozen custard which is kind of like soft-serve ice cream, but imagine it at least two times as creamy. The stuff is awesome. We had frozen custard at a place in the Grove Arcade in Asheville, and while it was tasty and more texturally satisfying than normal ice cream, it just didn’t cut it quite like East Coast Custard does.

As for my future plans, I’m hoping to hit up a few of the local brewpubs around here, especially The Brew Kettle, which I always visit when I’m in Cleveland, and I think I’m going to finally drive over to Canton to go to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I’ve always wanted to visit there and despite being a regular visitor for almost a decade now, I’ve never gone. It’s only about 45 minutes down the road from where I’m staying. I’ll probably end up going by myself, but I’m totally cool with that.