Morehead is a college town dropped into the folds of eastern Kentucky, where the Appalachian plateau begins to break up into steep wooded hollows. Morehead State University fills a good part of it, which gives the place more coffee, more students and more life on a weeknight than you might expect from a county seat of seven thousand people. Interstate 64 passes just north, but the town itself sits in a narrow valley along Triplett Creek, with the Daniel Boone National Forest closing in on almost every side.
It is a good place to start a day on the Route 32 and 7 highlands loop, because everything you need is here: several gas stations, diners, a supermarket, motels near the interstate exit. Once you head east toward Sandy Hook the services thin out quickly, so leave with a full tank and a bottle of water. The roads that radiate from Morehead are classic Kentucky back-country: two lanes, no shoulders, a creek on one side and a cut bank on the other, with corners that tighten without warning and the occasional coal truck or pickup coming the other way a little wide.
Rowan County has a rougher past than its campus lawns suggest. In the 1880s the Martin and Tolliver families fought a feud here that ended in a gun battle in the town itself, and for a while the place had a reputation for lawlessness. A generation later the county became known for something gentler: Cora Wilson Stewart, the local school superintendent, started the Moonlight Schools in 1911, night classes that taught adults to read on evenings when the moon was bright enough to walk to the schoolhouse. The idea spread across the state and beyond.
Southwest of town lies Cave Run Lake, a reservoir in the national forest with long arms of water reaching into the hills and a road along part of its shore that is worth a detour if you have an hour. In autumn the oaks, hickories and maples turn the whole forest copper and red, and early morning fog lies in the valleys until the sun burns through. Watch for deer at dawn and dusk, and for gravel washed onto the corners after rain, which is common on the smaller county roads.