Ye Olde Photographer, his Faire Spouse, and some friends stayed here in Shepherdstown, West Virginia during our 2013 Turkey Day Expedition. The town is located along the Potomac River and is home to Shepherd University. It is the oldest incorporated city in West Virginia and has lots of nifty old buildings and quite an assortment of eating places. Our base of operations was the Bavarian Inn which is fairly upscale and has a fine public restaurant and a less formal Rathskellar. Both specialize in foods out of the Bavarian tradition. Just the place for those into spaetzel and snitzel and sauerbraten, etc!

Another impressive eating place we enjoyed was the Yellow Brick Bank, a clever re-use of an old bank building that used the former vault for wine storage. The food was quite good. Alas, we have later learned after 38 years the YBB closed at the end of 2014 and has been reborn under new ownership as a Mexican restaurant, Mi Gollado #2, which shows some excellent reviews. For breakfast or lunch, Betty's is a small local place with really good food and a strong following.

An intriguing historical item - James Rumsey, an inventor who moved to Shepherdstown from elsewhere, built a steam powered boat incorporating hydraulic jet propulsion. He demonstrated the boat on the Potomac at Shepherdstown in October 1783, twenty years ahead of Robert Fulton. In recent years the Rumseian Society has been resurrected and successfully built a boat based on the limited information available. There is an article and a video available through the society's web page.