I'm going through photos from last year's trip to Appalachia, to supplement my writing up of the roadtrip tale on my blog.

This is a rather poor snapshot, through the car window, of downtown Appalachia, a small town in southwestern Virginia. Since my roadtrip was to Appalachia, the region, I felt compelled to take the route to the Cumberland Gap that went through Appalachia, the town. I prefer small roads to large anyway, so I skipped the highway from Norton to Big Stone Gap, instead taking the smaller road to Appalachia, and then an even smaller road to Pennington Gap by way of Keokee.

I'm still strangely pleased that there is a town called Appalachia. The region was very clearly a coal-mining area -- the only such area I saw during my trip to Appalachia (the region). Coal is important in the central and northern part of the Appalachians, and the town of Appalachia was about as far north as I got, so I saw very little coal, save in this part of Virginia.