Blogging from south eastern West Virginia, on a 100 acre farm belonging to my friend's sister. I can hear the sounds of bull frogs croaking in the stagnant pond nearby built by the beavers who tried to flood her out. Alas, the beavers are gone; it's kill or be killed here in the Appalachian mountains.

The farm, called the Rockdale Farm, lies at the end of a road. If I lived here, I would have a big barking dog and a shotgun so I could shoot any strangers who come on my property. If you love the silence of the country, this the place to be, but for me the isolation is hard to bear.

To get to town takes about 45 minutes on windy country road where deer, bunny rabbits, racoons and other animals dart in your path. Sometimes the road is paved and sometimes it's not. If you don't know where you're going, it would be easy to get freaked out and think you were lost.

This is beautiful country, unspoiled by industry, only because the windy roads make it impossible or any industry to sprout. Not that the state isn't trying. Everywhere you go, you see four colour brochures that sell West Virginia as the last great wilderness left in America. Perhaps they are right. You'd have to really want to live here to bear the isolation and the monotony of the trees and forests.

The people here are very friendly, which I don't find that surprising. I grew up in the country and most country folk are friendly on a one on one basis. My friend tells me it's the second to last poorest state in the nation; Mississippi being the poorest. Tourism is the only industry that West Virginia has and the country people know that.

In a general store near Droop Mountain, I had a fun flirtation with a guy whose car had Alberta license plates. He had a mountain bike attached to his car. There's a 76 mile river trail here that you can bike called the Greenbriar Trail. The trail runs along a river that you can swim in. We biked six miles of it on July 4th and swam in its muddy waters and watched lightning spikes on the ridge right in front of us.

Droop Mountain is the site of some civil war battle. We still haven't visited the site but we pass it on the way to my friend's parents' 150 acre farm which lies on the other side of Droop mountain.

Her mom says the weather is better on the top of mountain, especially in the winter time because the cold winter snow air settles down to the bottom of the valley. But when there are lightning storms, they're the first ones to get a bolt since there is nothing else on the mountain to hit.

We went to a luncheon today with authentic west virginia food. Corn pone, sugar cured ham, sweetened ice tea, baked beans, macaroni salad with mayo but no eggs, and cut tomoatoes from the garden. The ham was salty and fried to death but so delicious. Corn pone is nothing but a moister corn bread but it's what they eat here so it's native cuisine.

I had grits for the first time a couple of days ago. It tasted like a grainer version of my mother's lumpy cream of wheat. But again like the corn pone, it's authentic native cuisine.

There's so much more to write but technology seems so strange here in the Appalachian mountains. It almost feels sinful to be typing away on little baby laptop with pocket explorer that can't read javascript. Somewhere a West Virginian is having a laugh at my predicament. It's so typical of the state.