Day 31- 601 miles

Hey everyone, I apologize for the lack of posts lately. As you know I'm doing these from my phone and service has been scarce since we hit Kentucky. I'll start from the top. We made it into Pt. Pleasant, WV late morning, due to being up all night from lots of coyotes howling and raccoons being themselves, and decided to walk around. The flood wall that wraps around the city had a massive painting portraying the land as it was when the natives lived there. We had to check out the infamous Mothman statue located in the city park. In 1966 locals started seeing what looked like a man with huge bat-like wings and bright red eyes. There were around 100 sightings in a year, then one day the main suspension bridge collapsed in the middle of rush hour killing all but a handful of people. The Mothman was never seen again in WV. There was a movie made about it with Richard Gere as the lead. Anyways, we snapped some pictures and paddled along. We came across another lock under construction. A boater we talked to a few miles up said he has waited 8 hours to get through but we got lucky and made it through in 2. We made our way to Huntington, WV, which is the second largest city in WV (after Charleston). The movie We Are Marshall was based on the school here. We hit the city shore, got cleaned up, and headed in town to do some exploring. We made it about 8 blocks in when we noticed a vicious looking storm approaching so we turned around and headed back, seeing as we hadn't set up our tents up yet and didn't want to get stuck in the rain. We made it about a block and the winds started coming fast. The gusts were tearing shingles and siding off, knocking trees over, and blowing dirt everywhere. We started running, worried all our stuff was being blown into the river. We had to jump over and dodge debris everywhere. We got poured on setting up our tents so we took an MRE to bed and called it a night. We've since learned that the storm went all the way to Jersey and killed some 26 people. We left in the a.m. and were in Kentucky in no time! The river was the nastiest we've seen yet. You could see oil floating on top of the water, glass all over the banks, and we even saw a dirty needle near were we made camp. The next day was another long and hot day. To give you an idea of how low the water is I took a picture of a chair in a tree along the bank; has to be 20ft up. We hit Sciotoville,OH just before another intense storm hit. We slept close to a huge railroad bridge and the lighting struck all around us. Constructed in 1916, it is still the largest riveted truss bridge in the U.S. We found more rope swings! The river was chaos on the 4th, as you can imagine, and it was over 100 degrees again. We made it into Maysville, KY, home of George Clooney by the way, and made camp, wandered the town, and watched an awesome fireworks display. We're hoping to make it to Cincinnati by Saturday but the heat warning is extended until that night so it may be rough. Index of 110 tomorrow. That's all for now!