I’ve been a lot of places in my life. In fact, I have stepped foot in 39 of our United States. Big cities and small towns. I’ve traveled highways, byways, railways, waterways, dirt roads and the friendly skies. And I always found that I agreed with Albert Einstein when he said, “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.”

In my heart of hearts, I fancy myself to be a quixotic-Thoreauvian; an often unbalanced contradiction of unrealistic rationality.

The knight-errant who wishes for nothing more than to live life deliberately.

It was more knight-errant that brought me to the Greenbrier Valley of West Virginia; a stone’s throw from Old Dominion and a lifetime-removed from the Empire State. My choice to remain, however, that was made deliberately.

Why?

Well, as a kindred spirit once scribbled beside the stillness of Walden Pond, “I did not wish to live what was not life.”

While it’s true that the smooth voice of my mountain mama mistress, in the morning hours she calls me. And, admittedly, I’m more Alonso Quixano these days. But, from time to time, I do still spread the news like Don Quixote de la Mancha.

So, please consider this your personal invitation to come be a part of it. Old Dominion and the Mountain State…a part of the world that is truly sublime. But the only way to know it is to know it by experience.

The heart of Appalachia, and the soul of America.

This is where I live, and what I live for, because I do not wish to live what is not life.

– Matthew Young