It soon became quite evident that while locals are usually good intentioned, they generally know squat about what constitutes a hill to a biker. Even worse, locals get their topography and geography all mixed up. You can ask three different people at the same gas station what the road is like from one town to the next and no one will give you the same answer, some say it's flat, others say its hilly and some just say "take the interstate, it's a lot quicker."

The only thing that people seem to agree on is the fact that we're crazy for trying to ride our bikes across West Virginia. "Man, once you get east of Charleston, the roads go straight up and I mean like this," the young guy at the gas station warned us, angling his hand perpindicular to the ground. "There's a hill about 100 miles from here that they call Dead Man's Drop. I mean it goes straight down. A few years ago, four buddies and me tried to skate down. Two of 'em ended up with broken bones, two others ended up in the hospital and I was the only one to make it down without a scratch. You want to avoid that hill." Feeling sufficiently warned, Alex and I made the decision to navigate as far away as possible from any hill that contained the name "Dead Man."

"You also got to be careful of them backroads," our friend continued. "There's some mixed up hillbillies running around there. They'll see you guys riding those fancy bikes and think you got a lot of money. Best be if you stayed on some of the major roads that go through the bigger towns along the way." Usually, I take these warnings with a grain of salt, but the advice from the young guy at the gas station was not the only time we heard about possible trouble in the Appalachians of West Virginia. Almost everyone we encountered, forewarned us of the steep mountains and the desolate backroads.

Not all that eager to recreate some scenes from the movie Deliverance, Alex and I replotted our route and chose to do what countless explorers have done before us, we decided to follow the river. Our river of choice was the Ohio River. The Ohio forms the border of Kentucky and Ohio as well as the border between Ohio and West Virginia and runs northeast (actually it flows southwest to the Mississippi, but for our purposes, it flowed northeast) to Pittsburgh. Besides the scenery and the neat little river towns along the way, the main reason for following a river is the fact that the roads that hug the river are generally flat. If you follow the river upstream, you are going to be riding uphill, but it is usually an imperceptible grade, and since rivers don't go over mountains, your ride will be a whole lot more pleasant than going over hills called "Dead Man's Drop."

So, after Alex and I finally crossed the border from Kentucky into West Virginia, we picked up Route 2 and followed the road up the Ohio River. That night we arrived in the town of Point Pleasant. Point Pleasant is the site of one of the most important battles between the Indians and the early American settlers. In the 1780s, the newly formed United States began expanding westward, exploring the hostile wildnerness inhabited by Indians. Frequently, squirmishes would erupt on the western frontier between the settlers and the Indians. The settlers were aggressively searching for new farmlands, the Indians were protecting their homelands. The battle of Point Pleasant was the largest and most decisive victory for the settlers.

The monument that was erected in the early 1900s, proclaimed that this battle was the most important in all of the Indian wars, because it gave confidence to the young nation that it could tame the frontier and make safe the west for future expansion. If the Americans had lost the battle, it probably would have been deemed too dangerous to expand its boundaries beyond the Appalachian mountains. I found it quite interesting how the monument and the description of the battle differed quite noticably from the monuments and battle descriptions of the west. The plaque at Point Pleasant exuded heroism and regarded the battle as one of America's greatest victories while plaques for similar battles in the west were void of Point Pleasant's pomp and circumstance. Instead they recalled matter-of-factly the details about the battle, memorializing the battle fields, but recognizing the brutality which was inflicted upon the Indians.

When Alex and I arrived in Point Pleasant, it was getting late and we were tired from riding 94 miles. There was only one hotel in town and from the outside, it looked old and slightly run down. We weren't sure if this was where we wanted to spend the night, so Alex went inside to check things out. A few minutes later, Alex came outside with a big smile on his face and said "this is definitely where we're going to spend the night."

"Is it nice?"