T-Giving NC-- Cruisin' the National Road-- Zanesville East

November 21, 2010

East of Zanesville, there is a great old roadside eating place called Mickey's. Good food and atmosphere.

Baker's Motel is looking worse for wear; a big old mom and pop motel harkening back to the days of US-40 travel.

Norwich is the site of the first-recorded US pedestrian traffic fatality, and not in the early 1900s as you might think. It took place in 1831 and involved a stage coach.

I also saw the Old Stone House.

You have to really wonder when driving the original alignment of the National Road (not US-40 which was much more graded and travel-friendly although not as much as the interstates) how horses or oxen pulled the stage coaches and wagons up and down those steep hills.

Of course, there were those neat two S-Bridges before I got to Cambridge. In town, I passed the Frisbee Motel. You have to wonder how it got its name. For Christmas, they had Dicken-era statues wearing real clothes bunched around most of the streetlights. Nice touch.

Drove through town past Long's Motel and picked up I-77 going south.

Drove to the first rest area south of I-70 where I had stopped one time in the past and seemed to remember a plaque honoring the crash of an old dirigible back in the 1930s.

What Did I Spy at the Rest Stop? --RoadDog