Skip to main content

Visiting Virginia

Funnily enough, it was the trees that we really noticed this time.  Spreading oaks three times higher than the houses huddling beneath them.  Fat roots wriggling beneath the brick pavements.  And on the highways, you barely got out of town before the road became a channel between two walls of green leaves.  In Texas they have fast food joints and billboards along the interstates.  In Virginia, they have trees.

Richmond is a nicely-situated city; if you go south-east you get to the Atlantic Ocean, if you head north-west you reach the Blue Ridge Mountains.  We did both.

Family photo on Sandbridge beach
Graham and Toby at the Shenandoah Pass lookout point

John and Kristal took a day off work so they could accompany us to Sandbridge, where we set up camp underneath a big green umbrella and tried to stop Toby from eating sand.  He was quite a fan of the beach (great texture!) but the sea was far too cold and unpredictable.  One minute it's round your toes and the next it's hitting you in the chest!  Water isn't supposed to behave like that!  It's meant to stay nice and still and let you smack it.

I'm really not sure about this, Mum...

For the rest of us, the sea was a welcome chance to cool off.  It was fun to splash in some waves again.  By mid-afternoon the beach had become almost too hot to walk on, and we gathered up our sand-encrusted persons and possessions and headed for home.

This beach thing is hard work!

The next day we ventured out in the opposite direction, out to the beautiful countryside of Highland County.  My Uncle Peter and Aunt Mary have been renovating an old house up there for a while now.  It's still a work in progress but quite habitable and full of character (I loved the checker-painted kitchen floor), so we interrupted Mary's redecoration for a couple of days and took her for walks in the woods instead.  We enjoyed visiting with some of her family while we were there too.  There are definitely a few "removeds" in the technical description of my relationship to them, but you'd never know it from their welcome.  Toby and the dog collaborated in trying to do me out of my dinner - while Toby caused a distraction by trying to eat grass, the dog nipped in and swiped a tomato off my plate.  I didn't know which to grab first!

Peter and Mary's house

Driving a tractor!

If there is a perfect way to spend an evening it is this: Sitting around a bonfire in the peace of the silent hills, watching the blue of the sky deepen and the stars pop out one by one, until the horizon is dark and the misty brightness of the Milky Way arches overhead.  Some casual conversation and a few sticky s'mores, and the fleeting glimpse of a shooting star.  We stumbled back to the house in a blissed-out haze...

By the bonfire

...and spent the next hour trying to persuade a screaming baby to go back to sleep.  He was teething, I think.

This is kind of chilly, too...

Back Creek, Highland County VA

Back in Richmond, Toby had his first boat ride, a rather tame jaunt around a portion of the Kanawha Canal in the centre of the city.

On the boat

Kanawha Canal (with train)
 John and Kristal kindly babysat one evening so that Graham and I could enjoy a nice dinner and drink together.  Several weeks later, they are still wondering if they really want kids.



Date night at the Capital Ale House!

And we were treated to a double fireworks display for the Fourth of July - the city fireworks over the James River, and then, as we turned around, a thunderstorm coming in from the north.

 
All too soon, it was time to pack our bags again.  No, Toby, you don't need to go in there!

But I fit so well!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Growing things

For those of you who are interested in my attempts at balcony gardening, I thought I'd update you a little. For those who aren't, don't skip this post. You may find something else of interest. Apart from the ever-present herbs, tomatoes and cayenne peppers are on the go this year. The peppers are really on the go - we went away for a week and came back to find them twice the size as when we left. Now they're producing fruit which is growing at a similarly rapid rate, though none has ripened to red yet. I realised I should have given you some kind of scale, so I just went out and measured. They're about 22 cm long, or 8 1/2 inches for you non-metric types. I may have to find out how to dry peppers if they all ripen at once. A couple of tomato plants are looking pretty healthy and beginning to flower. A few died; one, apparently, by being eaten whole by a bird, a trouble I've never had before. I had two seedlings left so used those as replacements, b...
2 comments
Read more

The Imitation of Christ: Spiritual Formation Book 2

"This is my hope, my only consolation, to flee unto thee in every tribulation, to trust in thee, to call upon thee from my heart, and to wait patiently for thy consolation." The second of my  four books for spiritual formation  is The Imitation of Christ  by Thomas à Kempis.  The introduction to my copy starts off by saying that 21st century readers may wonder why they are bothering, which hardly seems like a recommendation!  I have to admit I finished it with a certain sense of relief, but there were some hidden gems along the way.  It's rather like reading the book of Proverbs.  There's no story or explanation of a theme, but there are astute observations, honest prayers, the occasional flash of humour, and quite a lot of repetition. Thomas à Kempis was a priest in an Augustinian monastery in the 1400s.  Presumably his life conditions favoured the silence and solitude that he advocates for in  The Imitation of Christ , but also gave him opp...
Post a Comment
Read more