No Known Address: a weekend with mom

when i first decided that i would be living for eight weeks in Wise County, VA, my mom expressed a desire to come out and visit an area of her home state that she had never seen. i had been compiling ideas of things to do ever since i arrived, and when i spoke to her last week she had only one request: let's go to Kentucky. and so we did. Sunday morning we began our drive toward Lynch, Kentucky (a chosen destination for obvious reasons) via Black Mountain, the tallest peak in the state. i had read on the internet that there was a small turn off at the state line where we could climb to the peak of the mountain where an FAA tower was in place. we drove about 1.5 miles and there it was. i said, should we turn around? but my mom's GPS device was showing only .3 miles back to route 160 where we had just been. we started down a dirt road and after a slow drive, i noticed the GPS said 3.1 miles to 160. hmmm. we decided to keep going. it soon became a very rocky path, with signs of recent rains washing away the rocks into uneven patterns and carving gullies into the edges of the path. we bumped down and farther down, much like i used to bump down the stairs on my butt as a child, taking care not to bottom out (pun intended). mom did a little side seat driving, directing me toward optimum paths free of drop offs while she clinched her seat belt. soon, an ATV/golf cart hybrid carrying a middle-aged couple came up behind us. i let them pass and used them as my guide down the mountain. i wasn't really nervous until the Garman showed no signs of knowing where in the world we were. we were just a bright blue cartoon car floating around in the blank green, hearing "drive to highlighted path" on repeat. we hoped that continuing to descend was a good sign, and i secretly hoped i wasn't going to have to test my nearly 10-year-old car further by turning around and climbing what we had just done. thankfully after about an hour of driving through unknown territory, constantly wondering if this road would just end or narrow or become a river, a highlighted pink route appeared on the GPS and we seemed to be driving toward it. all of a sudden, we popped out of the trees and onto a paved road. a road lined with pastel colored houses and manicured lawns. we were in Lynch, Kentucky. we realized we were actually on a side road and back tracked up main street to find the Welcome to Lynch sign (where we posed for a photo of course).
Lynch seemed slightly eerie to me. Eerie and odd. How could it not with a town motto of "Where coal mining is our heritage and bulldog and pirate legends live on." Pirates? Figures a town named Lynch would be crazy. I thought the homes that lined the streets in their Easter egg colors were quite quaint, but they were broken up by the deserted stone building, covered in vines, that at one point was a school as well as the abandoned coal shoots that crossed the road overhead. we were definitely in the heart of coal mining country and i wondered if the pastel facades served to lighten the gloom of this struggling industry.