At Oldtown, Maryland the Potomac River splits in two: the North Branch continues west and continues to form the border between Maryland and West Virginia, while the South Branch goes south into West Virginia. (Yes I'm aware that from the river's perspective, it is flowing north and east, but who cares what a river thinks). Today we went into West Virginia and paralleled the South Branch, first by car and then by train.
To cross into West Virginia, we had to cross the North Branch Potomac using Oldtown, MD's toll bridge. This privately owned toll bridge charged $1.90 per car, up recently from $1.50 due to the inflation. The rickety, one-lane wooden bridge only allows traffic in one direction at a time. Based on how it creaked and moaned when our compact SUV passed over it, I'm not sure it can handle more than one car at a time. The toll booth attendant, a human, passes you your change in a tin cup on a stick.
30 minutes deeper into West Virginia, you reach the Route 50 town of Romney, WV. While today Romney is probably most famous for being a stoping point on US-50, it actually far predates the US Highway System and markets itself as "West Virginia's Oldest Town" a claim disputed by Shepherdstown, WV. Both Romney and Shepherdstown were granted their town charters by Virginia on the same day but the order in which the charters were granted has been lost to history.
At Romney we boarded the Potomac Eagle Scenic Railroad, which offers exactly what it says it does: a scenic train ride on which you see Bald Eagles. The three hour tour parallels the South Branch Potomac. For the first 45 minutes, you see the river as it passes through a valley floodplain. It's mostly wide open fields with mountains in the distance, quite beautiful to look at. It makes you think that when Native Americans and early settlers entered this valley, it must have seemed a paradise to them. We passed several RV parks and campgrounds where people were kayaking, swimming, or fishing in the river, often in shocking states of undress. One kayaker mooned us. At another point, we saw an entire herd of black angus cows cooling off in the water.
Then the train enters what they call "the trough" which they market as a canyon. It's more like, the floodplain disappears and there are elevated rocky banks on both sides of the river. The trough is absolutely infested with Bald Eagles. I personally saw 7 bald eagles on the entire trip, of which 5 were in the trough. The train's PA system alerts you each time train staff spots a Bald Eagle. There were 13 eagle alerts in all, of which I only managed to see 7. The alerts are things like "there is an eagle on the other side of the river in a sycamore tree" and it's up to you to figure out which of the hundreds of trees they mean. The trough is also teeming with Paw Paw trees, which at this time of year are heavy with fruit.
Like every other place in this part of the country, George Washington once visited in the 1740's or 1750's as a teenage surveyor. At the end of the trough, George Washington himself appeared on the side of the tracks and boarded the train. He posed for pictures with anyone who wanted, talked about his experience exploring this valley as a teenager, and of course had no idea what anyone meant when they said "West Virginia", to him it was just the frontier part of Virginia. Our 8 year old wasn't having it and kept telling everyone not to fall for it, it's not the real George Washington.
