July 18,2006

Last night Nate's brother, Dallas, and his family arrived. Kelly andd Jill jumped right into conversation. Quin, two, and Rider, five, went into play mode. The popular toy was a blow-up bounce room that Uncle Forrest had sent Stella. For a while the kids jumped and played inside,but soon it was more fun jumping on the colapst toy.

Jill had prepared veggies and chicken for the Grill that Nate cookd up. All of the children,including Silas, sat at the kitchen table while the grown-ups sat in the diningroom. Jill decided to feed Silas and put him to bed for the night. Nate kept getting up to check on the children.

After dinner Dallas took Rider fishing and later Nate took Kelly and the girls to see how the fishing was going. When everyone got back Kelly got her laptop and showed pictures to Jill, and we went to the van where we watched a West Wing and went to bed.

The next day started off with a bang as Nate tried his slingshot on some squirrils. He found a rabbit to show Stella instead of getting a squirril. She called for HopHop. Silas was clean, full and comfortable. Kathy held him a while and he fell asleep. Afer breakfast the kids when out on the deck and painted. Not just on the paper, but all over themselves too! Quin, naked and painted with red all over looked the most colorful. Rider used shades of green and brown and looked more camouflage. Stella had a pained necklase. Next came hosing off the deck and children and then on to pool party time. It was still before nine.

We organized the roadtrek for departure. When Nate was leaving for work he said,"stay", bu it was time to leave the moms with the children.

We took back windy curvy roads over to Skyline Drive. We got on at the beginning, Rockfish Gap and started north. We paused at the Calf Mountain Overlook and made hotdogs for lunch. We sat at the edge of the hill looking out across the valley to meadows, ridges, hills, roads and houses below. We saw images in the clouds. A bright green walkingstick climbed on Kathy. He was just beautiful, for a bug that is. Our ride continued. We stopped at lots of Overlooks. At Turk Gap Overlook we spotted butterflies on the milkweed plants. One was a Monarch.

We made ourway up the mountain to Loft Information Center where we drove through the campground and made note that they have showers and laundry facilities and a sewage disposal station. More overlooks: Bacon, Swift and Hightop. At Swift Run Gap we got off the Skyline Drive where gas was $2.93 and got it for $2.75 a gal. The Byrd Visitor Center looks like an old lodge. We went in to look around and ended up staying longer because here was a thunderstorm. The computer was down, the TV room was showing the weather station, the restaurant was not open fo dinner until 5pm and in the big room people mingled, played checkers, put puzzles together and we read the paper. The rain stopped and we continued past Dark Hollow, the closest waterfall to the Drive, past more overlooks and through SkyLand where there is a resort built in 1890. We caught the sunset up at 3465 feet when the sun disappeared behind a cloud turning them pink. We throught we would just stay at the overlook after!
our movie, but it was not to be. About 11pm a ranger came knocking on our door and said he did not want us to be out by ourselves. He suggested we park at the Byrd Visitor Center we had just past. We did.

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