The plan for Day 8 was pretty simple: head North on West Virginia 16 until we ran out of West Virginia to head North in. Then hop across the Ohio river for no other reason than it allowed us to ride a ferry back to West Virginia 17 miles up the road. Then a short 60 mile sprint East, and we would be done for the day. Actually, we would essentially be done for the whole trip with nothing but highway miles awaiting us on Day 9. The day started with us waking up in the Cow Shed, relieved to find our bikes right outside our rooms just as we'd left them. I can't say as I remember what we did for breakfast, but it probably sucked. Not particularly wanting to stick around in Pineville, we were on our way in record time.

it was hot at this quick pit stop

When I originally planned the trip I had feared it would be unbearably hot. It hadn't really turned out that way. What was annoying was the amount of rain we had encountered. Unfortunately Day 8 was really hot, and we had sporadic rain in the afternoon. This left us faced with the choice of sweltering in our rain gear or drenching our leather. Fun.
I had anticipated Route 16 being every bit as aggressive and exciting as anything we had done on the trip. It didn't turn out that way. It's hard to say whether this was due entirely to the more relaxed roads of West Virginia or we were simply jaded after seven days of some of the best roads in the country. Either way, I was a little bored and disappointed. This point was really brought home when we stopped for gas after about an hour and met up with a local husband and wife out for a ride. They were extremely nice, she had been riding as his pillion for years but had finally gotten a bike of her own and couldn't have been happier. We told them a little about our trip so far, and they said we were in for a big treat over the next twenty miles. Relieved, I figured we were now just about to get started. Unfortunately the next twenty miles turned out to be pretty similar to the previous twenty, and I resigned myself to a less exciting finale to our trip than I had hoped.

the only restaurant in town. well...no town really, just the restaurant

West Virginia also turned out to be the state where we had the worst luck with cops. As we wound our way through the first 150 miles, we came upon an unmarked police cruiser heading in the same direction. We basically formed a slow but legal speed convey all the way to the Y restaurant where we were having lunch. It seemed there weren't a ton of places to eat in this neck of the woods, so naturally the cop was planning on eating there too. He nodded to us as he sat down, fully aware that we would have rather not spent the last hour and a half playing follow the leader. Matt had again decided to take a more reasonable approach to returning North, and was headed for the Interstate right after lunch, so it was a bit of a sad occasion. Luckily there was plenty of hush puppies to lift our dampened spirits with. After lunch we waived good-bye to Matt and headed out for the last decent section of the trip. I mounted up the camera for a second series of action shots and took the series of Adam you see below. Unfortunately it was soon sprinkling on and off, so I was never able to get to Zac. You can tell from the pictures how much more relaxed the road was in West Virginia. Long flowing sweepers rather than the tighter more aggressive roads we had been doing for the past week.