Real Life Mario Kart: Driving in West Virginia

Before I get into this, let me be absolutely clear about one thing: West Virginians are some of the kindest, most genuinely neighborly people I have ever had the pleasure of living alongside. This post is not a roast of the people. Not even a little bit. This is a love letter — a slightly breathless, white-knuckled, wide-eyed love letter — to the roads, the terrain, the wildlife, and the absolutely unhinged joy of driving in a state that seems to have been purpose-built as a real-life Mario Kart course.

I chose to move here. Deliberately. Eyes open. And I would not trade it for anything.

Now. Let’s talk about the track.

--- SELECT YOUR COURSE ---

In Mario Kart, the courses are legendary. Rainbow Road. Mushroom Gorge. Koopa Troopa Beach. Each one has its own personality, its own particular brand of chaos. West Virginia roads operate on the same principle, except instead of being designed by Nintendo engineers, they were carved out by rivers, mountains, and what I can only assume was a very adventurous surveyor with no fear of heights.

When Buck and I flew in for the first time — arriving at night, no less — I got my inaugural taste of WV navigation. In Colorado, where I came from, roads are straightforward. Practically geometric. You can see a turn coming from a quarter mile away and make a reasonable plan. Here? Your navigation app says “turn in 200 feet” and you have about three seconds to decide whether that gap in the vegetation is actually a road or a very confident deer path. (Spoiler: sometimes it is a deer path. And sometimes there’s a deer on it.)

The roads twist, double back, rise sharply, drop away, and occasionally seem to fold in on themselves in ways that defy cartography. And yet — here is the quantum miracle of West Virginia — if you miss a turn, you will still get where you’re going. You’ll just add two minutes. The roads have a way of looping back around like a track you’ve accidentally lapped. It’s disorienting and magical in equal measure.

--- WATCH FOR OBSTACLES ---

Every great Mario Kart course is littered with obstacles, and WV roads do not disappoint.

First, let’s talk about speed limits, because they deserve their own moment of appreciation. West Virginia posts speed limits with a confidence that I find both admirable and completely baffling. You will be on a road — a single lane, pothole-riddled, vegetation-on-both-sides, curves-every-forty-feet road — and there will be a sign telling you the limit is 55 mph. Fifty-five. We recently drove a two-mile stretch that Google Maps cheerfully informed us was a 55 mph road. We were on it for what felt like a small eternity. Our top speed was 23 mph. Twenty-three. We were not being cautious for the sake of it. That speed was genuinely the fastest the road would allow without launching us into the tree line or the ditch or, frankly, another dimension. The speed limit was not a suggestion grounded in reality. It was aspirational fiction.

And those bright yellow curve warning signs with the recommended speed? The ones that say “CURVE 25 MPH” in aggressive block lettering? Take them seriously. Take them more seriously than you have ever taken a sign in your life. Those signs have seen things. They know things. They are not placed there by people with nothing better to do. They are placed there by people who have watched what happens when someone doesn’t listen, and they would very much like you to listen.

And if the sign alone isn’t convincing enough, look to your right. Or your left. Because odds are good there’s a guardrail — or what used to be a guardrail — that will finish the argument for them. Crumpled. Folded. Leaning at an angle that suggests a deeply unpleasant evening for someone, sometime not too long ago. Some sections are missing posts entirely, the metal ribbon sagging between gaps like it’s given up. Others have been hit so many times they’ve developed a kind of sculptural character. They are battered, weathered monuments to the exact moment someone thought the curve sign was a suggestion. It was not a suggestion.

Before we go any further, we need to talk about Google Maps.

Google Maps is a wonderful technology. It is also, in West Virginia, a delusional optimist with an unreliable narrator problem. Speed limits? Often wrong. Sometimes hilariously, dangerously wrong, as previously established. But the speed limits are the least of it. The real adventure begins when Google Maps shows you a road — a named road, miles long, displayed confidently on the map in that reassuring shade of gray — and you turn onto it and realize, with dawning horror, that you are on someone’s private driveway. A very long private driveway. You start to see signs. “Private drive.” “Not a thru street.” “No trespassing.” And the always amusing, but not to be tested, “Bullets are expensive. Don't expect a warning shot.” But there's no place to turn around. You're in it now. Eventually you come to a slight widening and a gate. No way through, but turning around is perhaps possible. So you execute a clumsy seventeen-point turn in front of the homeowner giving you the “this again?” stare. Awkward waves are exchanged and you're back on your way. Your time is penalized.

In Mario Kart, there are shortcuts. Some of them are real shortcuts. Some of them send you off a cliff. Google Maps in West Virginia operates on the same principle. A road name and a line on a map does not a public road make. Sometimes it’s a logging road. Sometimes it’s a path a four-wheeler made once and someone thought looked promising. Sometimes it is, technically, a road, in the sense that vehicles have traveled it, but those vehicles had significantly higher clearance than yours and significantly fewer concerns about their paint job. Trust but verify. Actually, just verify.

Back to the road itself. You’re cruising along, feeling good, speedometer climbing toward that optimistic 55 mph sign, when suddenly the road narrows. Not subtly. There’s actually a sign for it — a bright yellow diamond with two black lines squeezing together, forcing out the center dashed line like the road itself is saying, “Alright, pick a side.” That sign means one thing: you are about to have a very intimate encounter with oncoming traffic, and only one of you is getting through at a time.

This is where West Virginia drivers earn their gold stars. There’s an unspoken courtesy here that feels almost choreographed. Whoever arrived first, goes first. If there’s a line, you alternate — one from each direction — like a perfectly civil zipper merge that no one had to legislate. It just works. Friendly waves, the occasional nod, and everyone continues on their way. Mario Kart without the blue shells.

Then there are the potholes. Oh, the potholes. They are everywhere, they are deep, and they appear around blind curves and you can’t see them coming. You swerve. The car coming the other way swerves. You both swerve toward the middle of the road at the same time, and for one terrifying half-second you are playing a game of chicken with someone who is also trying to save their front axle. Totally fine. Carry on.

And the wildlife. This cannot be overstated. Deer, raccoons, opossums, foxes, squirrels, chipmunks, woodchucks, hawks, vultures, crows, snakes, turtles, and frogs. FROGS. You must look high and low, near and far, at all hours. A hawk might be sitting in the road having a disagreement with a vulture over something unfortunate that happened earlier. A turtle is making its extremely slow and determined crossing. A deer is standing at the tree line, staring at you with the quiet authority of someone who was here first and knows it. These are not random events. These are the banana peels and item boxes of your daily commute.

Pedestrians, too, share your lane — and not by choice. Sidewalks are a luxury that the hollows simply could not accommodate — when you're carving a road into a narrow mountain valley, a sidewalk is an afterthought that never quite made it to the final design. So walkers take to the road, sharing the asphalt with the cars, trucks, tractors, and the occasional extremely confident turtle.

--- MULTIPLAYER CHAOS ---

Here is where it really gets good.

West Virginia roads are not exclusively traveled by cars. Oh no. On any given stretch of road, at any given moment, you may encounter: motorcycles weaving the curves with enviable confidence, tractors doing what tractors do (slowly, magnificently), side-by-sides and four-wheelers (apparently as entitled to your lane as you are), dirt bikes, snowplows in winter taking up every inch of available pavement, and tractor-trailers. Full-sized, eighteen-wheel, this-thing-should-not-physically-fit-here tractor-trailers, rounding curves on roads that were arguably not designed with them in mind. The crown jewel of these vehicular opponents, logging trucks. They’re squeezing through, impressively navigating the narrowest, steepest mountain roads loaded with anywhere from 20-70+ logs adding approximately 18 tons of weight to the truck itself. They know these roads and they know they’re way, WAY bigger than you.

And then there are the campers. West Virginia is spectacular camping country, so you will frequently find yourself behind a pickup truck hauling a travel trailer, or a full motor coach (itself the size of a small building) towing a Jeep behind it, navigating a mountain road that is technically one and a half lanes wide. You will slow down. You will be patient. You will appreciate the journey.

Everyone is swerving around the same potholes, slowing for the same animals, and watching the same tree line for falling debris. It is, genuinely, multiplayer.

--- COURSE HAZARDS: WEATHER EDITION ---

Mario Kart has its weather stages. West Virginia has actual weather.

A heavy rain rolls through — sometimes for hours — and the mountainsides respond accordingly. Mud slides into the road. Rocks bounce down from the ridgeline after a hard freeze and thaw. A 75-foot tree, roots finally exhausted, thuds down across the lane. Rivers, surging, quietly carve the road from underneath until what was pavement is now riverbank.

The road crews work constantly, heroically, against odds that are genuinely unfair. They fix one stretch, and the stretch they fixed three months ago needs attention again. They can’t win, but they don’t stop trying. And so the cones appear. The barrels appear. The portable stoplights appear — sometimes seemingly overnight, right around a curve on a 55 mph road, which means you come around the corner and you’re suddenly confronted by a red light. You have enough time to mutter your favorite curse word before you find out whether your brakes are as good as you believed.

The stoplight precedes a half-mile of road cones funneling two directions of traffic into one narrow lane, because the other lane is now two-thirds damaged pavement, a generous donation of river mud, and a suggestion of former road. You wait. The light turns green. You go. You feel like you have won something.

--- FINISH LINE ---

Here is the truth underneath all of this: driving in West Virginia is never boring. It is always an experience. It asks something of you — attention, patience, a willingness to slow down and actually look at where you are. And where you are is as breathtaking as it is hazardous. Mountains in every direction. Rivers running silver alongside the road. Wildflowers in the ditches. A red-tailed hawk riding a thermal overhead, unbothered by all of it.

You chose this route. You’ll choose it again tomorrow. The race isn’t going to run itself.