Vacation Day 5–My bad driving…

Our 5th day of vacation was one that we had set aside just for travel.  We had no real plans – just driving 9 hours from Charlottesville, VA, to Cave City, KY.  The previous evening Nathan discovered that one of our headlights was out, so first thing in the morning we headed out to find an auto parts store.  Yay for smart phones!  We were able to locate one and Nathan was able to quickly change out the headlamp.  Then we stopped at a bakery that we happened to see as we were heading to the auto parts store.  As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I kind of bumped up against the curb (which I hadn’t even noticed).  Opps.  Nathan gets out to look if there was any damage and luckily nothing on the body of the car was scratched or dented, but the very tip of the muffler was slightly bent.  He said it was fine and that there didn’t appear to be any problems.  So we go on out toward the highway. A few minutes later we begin to hear a loud rattling sound.  And I thought – oh no our muffler is coming off!!!!!!!!!  So I pulled into the closest parking area I could find.  Nathan checked under the car and the muffler was perfectly fine – BUT – a little cover that goes over part of it was completely loose.  As luck would have it, or maybe more like divine providence, I had pulled into an empty parking lot that was right next door to a little auto repair shop.  We went down and talked with the guy and he let us immediately pull our car into his garage and he was able to fix it with a simple bolt in less than 10 minutes.  Apparently the little bump that I dealt the muffler, had broken off a little plastic bracket that held the cover in place.  Who the heck puts PLASTIC underneath a car??  Don’t they know that there are drivers out there like me?????

Needless to say, when we left the auto repair place, Nathan was driving because I think he didn’t really trust me anymore :)

The one good thing that came out of that crazy morning – we discovered a amazingly delicious bakery chain.  I am so super sad that there are none of them in Florida.  The bakery is called Great Harvest Bread, Co.   The artisan bread that we had from there was so amazing.  And the cookies.  Oh the cookies.  I am still dreaming about them.  They have lots of locations around the country – just none in Florida.  I think our next vacation may have to center around a route that takes us by one!  They grind wheat daily to make their fresh breads and goodies.  It has inspired me to get a wheat grinder myself.  So Nathan – here’s a not so subtle hint for you – this is what I want for Christmas:

 

L'Equip 760200 NutriMill Grain Mill

• 20 Cup capacity grain mill that keeps all the vitamins and nutrition in every batch of flour
• The world's first variable texture control mill for creating fine or course flour
• Grinds on-oily grains with precision grain feed control; No gumming, no overheating, no jamming, no hassle
• Multi-channel air flow for better motor cooling and longer mill life, self cleaning milling chamber that is easy to use

 

I’ll even give you a link!

Vacation Day 4 – Monticello

After walking over 20 miles on the Appalachian trail for Nathan, it was time for us to do something for me.  So we took a short drive down to Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit the home of one of our founding fathers – Thomas Jefferson.

If has always been one of my life-long dreams to be a history buff, so while that has never actually really happened, I still love taking any opportunity that I can to learn about history.  American history is particularly fascinating to me.  So needless to say – I LOVED our visit to Monticello.  First of all the grounds are amazingly beautiful.  They have a huge vegetable garden planted.  A garden that they believe based on historical accounts would have been very similar to what would have been there in Jefferson’s time.

It was filled with tons of different vegetables and herbs.  One really strange thing for me, was that their rosemary was blooming all over.  I have rosemary in our tiny little garden and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it bloom.  It was lovely and so fragrant.  Even the butterflies thought it was wonderful.

At the back of the house,

is a beautiful garden walk, filled will all types of flowers and plants.  These are only a few of them:

The house itself was so fascinating.  Jefferson designed all of it himself.  There are influences from French and Roman architecture as well as some things that were completely unique to him.  They have restored the downstairs of the house to be pretty close to what it would have been when Jefferson was alive.  About half of the furniture and artwork is original that the heritage society has been able to locate in the last 80 years.  However they don’t let you take pictures downstairs because some of the artwork is borrowed and the society does not have photographic rights for those pieces.  So the following pictures I borrowed from the Monticello website.

Thomas Jefferson was a great collector of books.  His first library of books actually burned early on when he was first building his property.  But then he began his collection again.  He collected thousands of books.  During his later years he had amassed over 6,000 books.  Which is pretty impressive considering the time period that he lived in.  After his retirement from political office, he decided to sacrifice his collection of books, and sell them to the government so that the Library of Congress could be established. (This picture is also borrowed from Monticello’s website)

Shortly after this, in a letter to his close friend John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “I cannot live without books” and so he began collecting them again.  I would have to agree with him.  I don’t think that I could live without them either.

His home design was so interesting.  There is the big home that you see here:

It was set right at the top of the hill.  Then to the left and right of it were build two additional wings of the house that were mostly underground and then an underground passage that connected the two wings.  These were where the house servants lived as well as where the kitchen, stables, ice house, and brewery were located.

After the downstairs tour, we did the “behind the scenes” tour of the upstairs.  They have only in the last year and a half opened up the upstairs to the public.  And even then, only on special tours of 15 or less people at a time.  I had booked our behind the scenes tour 2 months in advance or there would have been no way that we would have gotten in!!!

And of the tours it was by far the most interesting.  Mostly due I think to our tour guide.  She shared so many personal quotes from letters written by Jefferson to family and friends, and also from letters written by his daughters and grandchildren.  After Jefferson retired from his political career, which included several years spent in France as the foreign minister there, and of course his two terms as President of the United States, he returned to his beloved Monticello.  However, he found the enormous house to be a lonely place (his wife had passed away many years earlier), so he invited his daughter and son-in-law, along with their ELEVEN children to come and live with him.    Now he truly had a full house :)

The upstairs has not yet been fully restored with period furniture but it was amazing all the same.  Almost all of the beds were in the little recessed alcoves and the bed frame was built right into the walls.

He was one of the first people in America to incorporate skylights into his home,

The detail that he had put into the rooms were lovely,

He was definitely a dreamer.  Out of this window you can see a hill, which he purchased and planned to put a space observatory on it.    That would have been something!

His designing also was very focused on saving space.  He had the most narrow stairs in such a huge home.  It was crazy!

Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant man.  But for all of his brilliance, he was also something of a contradiction.  This is the man who penned the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  And yet, he was a slave owner.  During his life, he owned over 600 slaves.  It is quite clear that he treated his slaves well.  In fact he was the only slave owner, to promote one of his slaves to the position of foreman of his plantation.  But for all his good treatment, they were still slaves and did not have the freedoms that he proclaimed belonged to every man.  In addition to this flaw, it has also been shown that he is most likely the father of 6 children born to one of his slaves, Sally Hemming.  It is a bit difficult for me to reconcile these ideas with someone that did so much for our country and for whom I have such respect for his writings.  I guess that is why God is the judge of man and I am not.  Regardless of some of his flaws, he was still a brilliant man who was instrumental in shaping our country.  And he had a beautiful home.

Jefferson wrote his own epithet.  The three accomplishments in his lifetime that he valued most are carved on the monument at his gravesite.

He wanted to remembered as the author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Articles of the Freedom of Religion for Virginia, and as the founder of the University of Virginia.  He wanted to be seen as a champion of liberty, of religious choice, and of education.  Three extremely noble causes.

Vacation Day 3– One Bear, two horses, more deer, and a lot more walking…

That night we had the pleasant (note the sarcasm) surprise of getting woken up around 3:00 in the morning with the loud beeping of the smoke alarm in our room.  Eventually Nathan just ended up removing the battery.  So we slept for a little while longer and then decided to get ourselves out on the trail again.  It was a beautiful morning.  Nice and cool.  But bright and sunny. 

One of the nice things about these trails is that you never know what might be just around the bend.  Like a pretty little brook flowing down the mountain,

Or a hidden rustic cabin,

Or an amazing view,

Or a crazy high cliff,

Or more deer grazing in the forest.

Every second felt like adventure.  Well the first few miles anyway.  Then you start to get tired.  Luckily our second day of hiking was only 7.7 miles.  Did I just say only???  Hiking the Appalachian trail is definitely a once in a lifetime experience – because I only plan on doing it ONCE in my lifetime.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is lots of hiking in our future, but never that far again.

Anyway, because of our early start and the shorter hike, we make it to the second lodge, Skyland Ranch, in time for a late lunch.  Then we headed down to the stables for a little horse ride.

Meet Midnight and Lightnin.  Our two best friends for the next hour.  I have to admit, I thinking going through the forest is a lot better on horseback than on my own two feet :)

Upon arriving back at the stables, we were greeted with this guy.

I was literally only standing about 25 feet away from him and snapping pictures.  It was crazy.  The girls at the stable called him Patches and said that he is a pretty frequent visitor there.  Wild.

Then, I let Nathan talk me into doing yet ANOTHER hike down to a waterfall.

It was truly beautiful though, and completely worth it.

“It was worth it” pretty much became my catch phrase for most of this trip.  I had to tell myself something to keep on pushing myself so hard!!!  On the way back up the mountain, I asked Nathan to stop and take this picture of me,

not because I really wanted a picture of myself, but I was tired of asking him to stop and give me a breather, so I had to come up with some other excuse to stop and sit down for a minute.  Sshhhh…don’t tell Nathan!

After such an exciting afternoon, it was nice to have a lovely dinner with this as our view.

Then we decided to check out the nightlife at the lodge.  The lodge has live entertainment every night.  That night, a old fashioned string band was playing.

They were good times.  They played all kinds of local old-time mountain music.  It was the perfect end to the night, to sit back and eat some desserts,

and enjoy their music.

Vacation Day 2 – The Appalachian Trail

We again woke up very early to get a good start on the day and make the 1.5 hour drive up through the mountains to enter the Shenandoah National Park.  Here at the park we plan to do two days of hiking along the Appalachian Train and stay each night at a lodge located in the park.  We meet up with our shuttle driver, drop off our luggage at the first lodge and then the shuttle driver drops us off at Lewis Mountain, the beginning of our hike.  Less than 10 minutes into our hike, we come across this:

She just stood there and watched us and then went back to eating.  We were probably less than 20 feet away, but she didn’t let that bother her too much!  It was crazy how close the wildlife there would let you get to them. 

We hiked a bit more, finding lots of beautiful lush forest to refresh our senses and beautiful overlooks to delight our minds with the majesty of God’s creations.

Then we came to the scariest part of our day.  The rock scramble.  Sounds simple enough, right?  Just a little scrambling over some rocks.  Sure, I’m up for that.

Started out not so bad.  But then we were going higher and higher and I was noticing more and more how far we would fall if either of us were to slip on these very uneven steep rocks. 

My heart was pumping, the adrenalin flowing, and I was feeling a bit like this:

But I will say that while it was a little crazy in the middle of doing it, the view was amazing and completely worth the effort.

After finally making it down off the rocks, we hiked along some pretty even slightly declining trails, that I figure were our reward after that insane scramble across the rocks.

But then the trail began to climb, and climb a little more, and a little more, until I was asking Nathan to stop about every 5 minutes to give me a breather.  I thought that I had gotten myself into pretty good shape before this trip – I was WRONG.  Hiking up a mountain is HARD!!!!!!!!!!!  But when we finally made it to the top we found a little overlook called “Hazeltop” and sat down and had our trail lunch.  Seriously, you can’t beat a view like this for lunch:

All along the trail these lovely wildflowers grew.  Aren’t they beautiful?

After finally making it about 9 miles, almost to the lodge, we decided to take a side trail and go down to see this waterfall.

By this point in the day, my feet were killing me.  So we stopped off by the stream that fed the waterfall to give our feet a little soak.

That water was so cold that you could only leave your feet in there for about 10 seconds before you had to pull them out!!!!  It certainly make them feel better though, because after 10 seconds in the water your feet were feeling pretty numb!

After a crazy steep hike back up from the waterfall (I was almost dying by this point) we finally made it to the lodge, checked in and then took a shower in the tiniest shower ever.  I’m not really that big of a person, but I was feeling pretty claustrophobic in this thing.  All in all, we walked 13 miles that day.  I think we were nuts.  And my body was screaming at me!  Gladly though for all the tininess of cabin we stayed in that night, at least the food was delicious!!!  And the view just beautiful.  It was so interesting to watch a rain storm blow through the valley while we sat completely dry up on the mountain.