Why I Travel the Backroads

My wife and I love to travel the country’s backroads. There are many positive reasons for our preference for highways other than interstates and expressways.

Engineers design and build multi-lane thoroughfares to save time by avoiding small towns, winding mountainous roads, lower speed limits, and often slower traffic. When you are retired, those reasons play second fiddle to scenery, wildlife, and plain old country charm.

The secondary roads hold surprises along the way. We find sleepy towns with impressive century-old homes, cozy diners and restaurants, locally owned and operated cafes, and shops we would miss on the superhighways. We discover fascinating state parks and cascading streams that play tag with the roads. We enter canopy tunnels of giant oaks and maples, flashy sycamores, and towering tulip poplar trees.

We also see too many storefronts shuttered in once-thriving downtown business districts. In the country, we pass abandoned houses far too often. They remind us of our younger years and serve as a reality check for the 21st century.

Of course, driving the roads less traveled has its drawbacks. Traffic comes to a crawl behind agricultural equipment, traveling at a snail’s pace from one farm to another. Semi-trucks delivering goods to local businesses block traffic flow for minutes while they attempt to squeeze into awkward and narrow loading docks. We feel the driver’s frustration.

Occasionally, traffic halts completely as cowboys on ATVs round up a herd of wayward cattle. I’ve even had to pull the car off the road to let them pass. Others might consider these situations as inconveniences. Rather than despair, I accept them as a part of everyday rural living.

Our latest trip to visit our son and his family in upstate New York, nearly 500 miles from our home in Virginia’s lovely Shenandoah Valley, offered similar experiences.

The ancient Allegheny Mountains bend northeast across Pennsylvania, making a direct route north impossible. So, we have learned to divide the trip into two days, taking alternate routes each time. Traveling with patience allows us to observe and appreciate whatever we see along the state and county roads that deliver us to our destination.

With the folded forested mountains on either side of us, the roads hugged and crossed the Susquehanna River with its many rapids and occasional islands. We stay the night in small cities like Williamsport, Pennsylvania, or Corning, New York.

We stop at overlooks to view the Susquehanna, tour the famous glass factory, or visit an old-fashioned country store and still arrive at our appointed time relaxed and stress-free. It’s a win-win situation.

We headed south after our joyous visit with our son, his wife, and their curious two-year-old son. However, a last-minute decision turned our car west toward New York’s Letchworth State Park. It was time well spent.

Avid birder that I am, I stopped at several overlooks to view the impressive Genesee River Gorge and scout for birds. At one spot, a pair of Scarlet Tanagers foraged in an old oak tree, its leaves still not completely unfurled. A Summer Tanager landed nearby, but I was too slow with my camera. I savored the image of the bright red bird with a light-colored beak and was happier still that my wife got to see it, too.

The cheery songs of migrating songbirds resounded, but we had to keep moving since we were already taking the slow way home. Soon, we arrived at the lookouts to view the river’s inspiring trio of falls that cut the deep gorge a millennia ago.

I parked beside a vehicle identical in every way to our midsized SUV. The occupants exited their car just as we did, ecstatic about the fate of two metallic bronze Subarus parked side by side. I caught the stranger’s infectious joy and soaked in the three roaring falls.

I set the GPS for Altoona and noted that we would travel unexplored territory en route to the hotel. For most of the way, it was all state and county roads.

I knew we had hit the jackpot when we turned onto Short Track Road, a narrow county highway built to convenience locals. It wasn’t long until we began passing white homes with fading red barns. That combination meant one thing: Amish. Those farmsteads reminded us of our nearly four decades in Ohio’s Amish country, where we daily viewed similar scenes.

The hand-painted signs with mismatched upper and lowercase letters advertising cottage industries of hand-stitched quilts, local honey, brown eggs, and sawmill services brought familiarity. However, as is often the case with the Amish, they tweaked their clothing and buggies slightly different from their home communities in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

We noted that the crown of men’s black felt hats tapered from the brim to a flat top. The buggies were styled more plainly, equipped with different lighting and reflective tape, and displayed no orange, slow-moving triangle on the back. It was a sign of both their independence and connectedness to one another.

We crossed the fast-running headwaters of the Susquehanna on a decades-old, baby-blue iron bridge. Our car tires hummed over the meshed steel grating. Soon, we passed a white-brick country church that caused me to double-take. Its marque read, “Forget hope. Attend church.” Even though it was a Sunday, we kept driving.

We passed the entrance to yet another state park that looked immaculate. The road quickly turned and began a winding, steady climb up a low mountain. The rushing white waters of a roadside stream beckoned, but with no pullouts, we couldn’t stop to enjoy it fully.

On the downslope, the road straightened and eventually flattened out, with pasturelands on one side and wetlands on the other. I spotted a box turtle crossing the road. With little to no traffic, I stopped and carried it across. It was the least I could do.

Our journey continued the next day with similar effects. We visited the Paw Paw Tunnel Towpath Trail near Old Town, Maryland. As we left the car, birdsong and butterflies filled the air.

Walking from the parking lot to the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal tunnel, the sights and sounds only improved. Baltimore and Orchard Orioles chattered competing calls from adjacent trees. A pair of Eastern Phoebes fed their young in a nest built on the canal’s old stone retaining wall. Blackburnian Warblers and Warbling Vireos serenaded us hidden among the leaves.

Black and Tiger Swallowtails, Pipevine, Dusky Wings, and Cabbage butterflies danced from wildflower to wildflower. Some gathered nutrients from puddles on the trail.

Please click on the photos to enlarge them.

We exchanged greetings with other hikers and bikers as we strolled along. The graveled trail’s dappled light, filtered by a mix of deciduous trees, big and small, cooled the hot day.

Satisfied and ready to be home, we crossed the Potomac River into West Virginia and steered south. Though arriving home tired, our drive on the backroads proved more refreshing than this septuagenarian could have imagined. That’s why we take them.

© Bruce Stambaugh 2024