Babcock State Park - our welcome party

As we left out of Charleston, West Virginia, we merged onto Highway 60. We're still traveling along the Kanawha River--the same river we camped beside for the last two nights.

We found that the nickname for this highway is "The Midland Trail." It's a little unnerving to drive a motor home towing a pickup into the mountains on a "trail." This drive isn't for the faint-hearted (or inexperienced RVers). This road winds up into the Allegheny mountain range of the Appalachian Mountains. Besides all the curves in the road, we are also going up in elevation, sometimes with an 8 percent grade. It's not often that you can look down the highway and see three yellow arrows pointing in different directions to help keep you on the "trail."

It was a tough 75-mile trip today, and we were ready to put out the hammock and relax once we got into our site at Babcock State Park. We have a great site for the first two days! We found out that this campground fills up every night. We wanted to stay four days, so we will have to move to a different site in the middle of our time here.

The campers before us had just pulled out of our site minutes before we arrived. In fact, the logs were still smoking. It was like they had left us a campfire welcoming party. It didn't take any effort to bring the logs back up to heat, so we changed the menu for dinner. We're now having some bratwurst cooked over the hot coals!

What's a welcome party without dessert? Dessert will be smores--of course--made with six marshmallows.

That leftover log was the perfect temperature for toasting the perfect marshmallows!

After that delicious welcome party, we needed some exercise. The campground is separated from the rest of the state park, so we had to drive several miles to get to the part of Babcock State Park that most people visit.

The main attraction here is this Glade Creek Grist Mill, where we took way too many pictures.

Then we set off on a little walk to see what else this state park has to offer. We hiked up to Boley Lake, and we hope to get our kayak on the water here.

We discovered that we could go up-hill from the lake on the Triple Creek Trail (with you guessed it--three creek crossings). It also led us through some nice mountain laurel blooms.

These flowers are beautiful in the spring, but we are finding a few left blooming this summer here at this higher altitude.

Being in the mountains means that the roads are steep and so are the hiking trails. We came down on the Wilderness Trail, which had an interesting ramp to crawl down from a precarious viewpoint.

Our hike ended on the Island in the Sky Trail with some great viewpoints and rock formations. Our "little walk" this evening turned into a 3.7-mile hike up and down through most of Babcock State Park. We felt like we'd been on many steep trails today--driving on the Midland Trail in the motor home, and now hiking on three more trails inside the park. 

It was a great evening at Babcock State Park, and we feel like we've been given a warm welcome. We think we're going to like it here!