Terms of Use

Updated: July 26, 2026

Travel Under Cost is published by Travel Under Cost LLC, a registered West Virginia Limited Liability Company. These terms explain what you may do with the pages, illustrations, and trip records kept here. They also explain what this publication is not, which matters more than most readers expect. Please read them once before you lean on anything written in the journal.

Accepting these terms

By opening travelundercost.com and reading what sits here, you agree to the terms written on this page. If any part of them does not sit right with you, the plain answer is to close the tab. The terms apply to every section of the site, including the trip records, the hub pages, and the reader forms. They apply whether you arrive on a phone in a gravel lot or on a desktop at home. We have tried to write them in ordinary language, because a journal about public ground should not hide behind long clauses. Where a term carries a settled legal meaning, that meaning still holds, even though the wording here stays plain.

What this publication is

Travel Under Cost is an independent journal about public places in West Virginia, written and edited by Wes Cardwell. It is published by Travel Under Cost LLC, a registered West Virginia Limited Liability Company based in Charleston. The journal records what a trip asks of a traveler in hours, miles, and daylight, and nothing beyond that. It arranges no trips, sells no tickets, tours, or lodging, handles no payments, and books nothing on your behalf. It holds no affiliation with any carrier, park operator, or booking platform, and it takes direction from none of them. Nothing on this site is an offer, a reservation, a contract for travel services, or professional advice of any kind.

When a page describes a river landing or a state park, it describes a place that stands open to the public. Conditions at those places shift with weather, season, staffing, and repair work, and one journal cannot track every shift. You remain the person who decides whether to make the drive.

What you may do here

You may read the journal, print a page for your own use, and send a link to a friend or a class. You may quote a short passage in your own writing, in a lesson plan, or in a community newsletter, with attribution. Attribution means naming the journal as Travel Under Cost and naming the title of the page you drew from.

You may not do any of the following:

• copy a full trip record or a policy page and publish it under another name
• run automated collectors, harvesters, or crawlers that pull these pages in bulk
• feed the text or the illustrations into a system that trains or tunes a model
• republish, license, or bundle the writing as part of another product or service
• alter a page and present the altered version as the work of this journal
• probe, scan, or overload the site, or try to reach parts of it that are not public
• use the reader forms to send bulk messages, malicious files, or content aimed at harassing a person

The lines above are not decoration, and the publisher will act on them when a reader crosses one.

Words and illustrations

Every sentence in the journal, along with every illustration, count block, and page layout, belongs to Travel Under Cost LLC. The masthead, the wordmark, the ridge logo, and the section names are marks of the company as well. Copyright protection covers the whole collection and each part of it, including the trip records and the policy pages. The illustrations are made for this journal alone, so they may not be lifted and dropped onto other sites.

Short quotation with attribution is welcome, and a passage of about fifty words is a reasonable ceiling for it. Anything past that needs written permission, which you can request at the address in the last section. Permission is often granted for classroom use, library displays, and local historical projects, and it is granted in writing. Automated collection for model training is refused across the whole site, and that refusal covers text and illustrations alike. The absence of a technical block should never be read as permission, because permission here is given in writing or not at all.

Copyright concerns

The journal writes its own material, commissions its own illustrations, and checks its sources before a trip record goes up. Even so, mistakes happen, and if you believe something here uses your work without permission, the desk wants to hear about it. Send a notice by email to milepost@travelundercost.com, or by mail to Travel Under Cost LLC, 707 Virginia Street East, Charleston, WV 25301, United States.

A complete notice includes the following:

• your name, mailing address, telephone number, and an email address where you can be reached
• a description of the work you believe was used, clear enough for the desk to identify it
• the address of the page on this site where the material appears, with a paragraph reference if you have one
• a statement that you hold the rights in the work or act for the person who holds them
• a statement, made in good faith, that the use was not permitted by you, your agent, or the law
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, made under penalty of perjury
• your signature, written or typed, at the end of the notice

The desk answers a complete notice within ten business days of receiving it, counted in Eastern Time. While the review runs, the page in question may be taken down, edited, or left in place. If material of yours was removed and you believe the removal was wrong, write to the same address. A counter notice should identify the material, state the grounds for restoring it, and give the contact details listed above. Readers who send repeated infringing material lose access to the reader forms and to any permission the journal has granted.

Place names and what they signify

The journal names real rivers, ridges, parks, streets, counties, and towns, because a trip record without names is useless. Naming a place is not a recommendation, a rating, or a claim that the place will suit you on the day you go. Coverage in this journal is never sold or traded, and no park operator or town office has any say in what a record says.

Access, hours, closures, and conditions can change without warning, so confirm current details with the operator before you drive. The journal describes what one traveler found on one day, which is a record and not an instruction.

Notes you send to the desk

The contact form and the newsletter form carry a short message to the reader desk, and that is their only purpose. Please keep sensitive personal details out of the message box, because an editorial inbox is the wrong place for them. When you send a correction, a place suggestion, or a note about a trip, you allow the journal to use it. Use may mean quoting a line in a later trip record, always without your last name unless you ask otherwise. You keep ownership of what you write, and you can ask for a note to be set aside at any time. The Privacy Policy explains what happens to the data behind those messages and how long it is kept.

No warranty on the pages

The journal is offered as it stands, with the errors and gaps that any small publication carries. Travel Under Cost LLC makes no promise that the site will run without interruption or that every page will load. It makes no promise that a trip record matches conditions on the day you read it or the day you drive. Hours, mileage, footing, and season notes are one traveler's measurements, taken with ordinary tools and ordinary attention. Nothing here is engineering advice, legal advice, or a substitute for the judgment of the people who manage a site. Where the law does not allow a publisher to disclaim something, that part of this section does not apply to you.

Limits on liability

To the extent the law allows, Travel Under Cost LLC is not liable for harm arising from use of this site. That includes indirect, incidental, and consequential harm, and it includes anything that follows from a trip you chose to make. It also includes harm tied to an interruption, a broken page, or a delay in publishing a correction. Your remedy, if the journal disappoints you, is to stop reading it, and that remedy is the whole of it. Some states do not allow every limit written above, so these limits apply only as far as your state permits.

Your responsibility for claims

If your use of the journal brings a claim against the publisher, you agree to take responsibility for that claim. That means defending Travel Under Cost LLC and holding it harmless from demands, losses, and legal actions tied to your conduct. Conduct here means copying without permission, sending harmful content through the forms, or breaking the limits set out above. The publisher will tell you promptly about any claim it receives and will cooperate in a reasonable defense.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of the State of West Virginia, without regard to conflict of law rules. A dispute that reaches a courtroom belongs with the state or federal courts sitting in Kanawha County, West Virginia. By using the site, you consent to personal jurisdiction in those courts and to venue in that county. If a court finds one clause unenforceable, the rest of the page stays in effect and is read as written. A failure to enforce a term on one occasion is not a waiver of that term on the next occasion. This page, the Privacy Policy, the Cookie Policy, and the Disclaimer taken together form the whole agreement between us.

Changes to this page

The journal revises these terms when the law shifts, when a section proves unclear, or when the site gains a feature. The date at the top of the page shows the last revision, and older wording is not archived on the site. Continued reading after a change means you accept the version posted at that moment, so check the date now and then. A substantial change also earns a short line on the FAQ page, under the company and legal questions.

Reaching the desk

Questions about these terms go to milepost@travelundercost.com, and questions about personal data go to register@travelundercost.com. You can also write to Travel Under Cost LLC, 707 Virginia Street East, Charleston, WV 25301, United States. The telephone line is +1 (304) 346-2140, answered Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, Eastern Time. The Contact page carries the same details, along with a form that reaches the same reader desk.