Morgantown — West Virginia

A college town on the Monongahela River where a driverless pod train from the 1970s still shuttles students between campuses like something out of an old sci-fi film. Lia made me ride it twice just to be sure it was real.

The first thing anyone tells you about Morgantown, before the football or the river or the hills, is the PRT — the Personal Rapid Transit system, a fleet of small driverless cars built in the 1970s that still glides students between West Virginia University’s downtown and Evansdale campuses on elevated concrete guideways. I’d read about it before we arrived and assumed it would feel like a museum piece; instead it just works, silently, all day, and riding one felt like being handed a glimpse of the future that the rest of the country decided not to build. We got on at the Walnut Street station downtown and rode it out past the engineering buildings just to watch the town scroll by from ten feet up.

High Street and the river

Below the university, downtown Morgantown centers on High Street, a strip of bars, bookshops, and the kind of coffee counters that stay open late during finals week. It has the particular energy of a college town — students in Mountaineer gold cutting between classes, the low roar of Mountaineer Field on a home Saturday audible from blocks away — but the Monongahela River gives it a different rhythm too, barges still moving coal downstream past the Hazel and West Run bridges while joggers work the Caperton Trail along the bank. I liked Morgantown best in the early evening, when the students thinned out and the river caught the last light.

The Monongahela River waterfront trail in Morgantown, West Virginia at sunset

Cheat Lake

A short drive east of downtown, Cheat Lake opens up between wooded ridges, a reservoir on the Cheat River that Morgantown locals treat as their unofficial backyard — jet skis and pontoon boats in summer, a lakeside trail for the rest of the year. We rented kayaks from a dock near the dam and paddled into a cove where the water went glassy and quiet enough to hear woodpeckers working the far shore. It’s the kind of place that makes you forget you’re twenty minutes from a university of thirty thousand students.

Kayaks on the calm water of Cheat Lake near Morgantown, West Virginia

Getting There

Morgantown has its own regional airport (MGW) with limited connections, but most visitors fly into Pittsburgh International (PIT), about an hour and fifteen minutes north on I-79. From Washington, D.C., it’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive west. A car helps for reaching Cheat Lake and the outskirts, but downtown and the WVU campuses are compact enough to walk once the PRT does the heavy lifting.