Hey guys. Guess what? We’re taking another trip! And I tell you what, I may not be all that diligent about blogging about day-to-day life, but I can flat blog on a road trip, so here we go. Brian and I are headed to Austin, Texas, via Kentucky and Oklahoma, two of the mere seven states we have yet to visit (the others are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota). So, let’s do this!

Now, this may come as a surprise to you (as it did to me), but Kentucky is actually kind of hard to reach from Washington, D.C. There just aren’t enough roads in the right places. We had to head north and west for a bit, and now we’re near Columbus, Ohio. The cool part about this, though, is that we got to visit FIVE states today! We headed NW from DC (1) into Maryland (2), then up slightly to Pennsylvania (3), then west through that tiny part of West Virginia (4), then continued into Ohio (5). That’s a pretty good total, even for us.

Our route through Maryland took us right through Sideling Hill. We actually passed through there before, but we didn’t have the time or inclination at that point to stop… but today was a whole different story. The visitor’s center was still open, so we decided to check it out. And guess what? IT WAS AWESOME!!!

In case you forgot:

The Sideling Hill road cut is a 340-foot deep road cut where Interstate 68 cuts through Sideling Hill, about 6 miles west of Hancock in Washington County, Maryland. It is notable as an impressive man-made mountain pass, visible from miles away and is considered one of the best rock exposures in Maryland and the entire northeastern United States. Almost 810 feet of strata in a tightly folded syncline are exposed in this road cut. Although other exposures may surpass Sideling Hill in either thickness of exposed strata or in quality of geologic structure, few can equal its combination of both.

Thanks again, Wikipedia!

If you go into the visitor’s center, you can walk across this little pedestrian bridge over the highway to look at Sideling Hill. The bridge has a tall chain link fence around it (I guess to prevent people from jumping off and landing on the highway below), but the fence has “camera ports” in it so you and your camera can both get a nice view of the mountain pass:

Then there’s a little walkway on the side so you can get a closer look:

You can see some white stripes running down the sides of the cut. We thought they were just part of the rocks at first, but they turned out to be ice! Today was one of those weird temperature days that’s very chilly in the shade but quite warm in the sun, so the shaded sides of Sideling Hill had frozen “seep.” Want a closer look? So did we!

Thanks, Sideling Hill!

We also saw some interesting/weird little rainbow patches in an otherwise very clear sky in Pennsylvania this afternoon:

So, that’s it for today. We’re tucked in for the night at the Days Inn in Grove City, Ohio (which is clean but, I have to admit, pretty busted. The last person who stayed here apparently had a fight with the bathroom wall!). Check back tomorrow for another update!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 10:45 pm and is filed under 2009 Mini Road Trip: DC-KY-OK-TX-MS-DC.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.