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Western Pennsylvania: in Appalachia

Lincoln Highway Road Trip, day 5.

A few more shots of the drive here in western Pennsylvania. It’s not all picture postcard little towns. There are stretches of the road where the towns have seen better days. Away from the more prosperous areas one also sees lots of old motels and fading roadside business (this is after all a once well traveled road now bypassed by faster and bigger highways and interstates), huge cars (mostly pickups) the vehicles of choice, peeling paint on the old homes…I thought to myself as I was driving along that some of it had an Appalachian feel to it.

There was this one stretch of the road in the mountains (well, hills by California standards) in a particularly isolated area with some semi-deserted looking down-and-out towns where I started humming Dueling Banjos and thinking Deliverance – I couldn’t help myself. Duh, it IS still Appalachia (which I figured out when I did a little googling). Sometimes this part of Pennsylvania also feels very southern – looking at the map, the part of the state where I have been driving borders Maryland and now (where I am at the moment) West Virginia.

Lots of BBQ places (the one I stopped at yesterday was world class). When I hit the Ohio border either later today or tomorrow I will first cut through a small corner of West Virginia as I continue on the Lincoln Highway after Pittsburgh.

Muhammad Ali, RIP – you were the Greatest.