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.

------------------------------
Sent via PocketMail
Email Anywhere
www.pocketmail.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Houston Fest Galax, VA

Image
We arrived in Galax, VA and stopped at our friend, Harold's. He was just putting the finishing touches on a cake he made for his nephew.  Harold is great in the kitchen! Brenda arrived!  We had a nice meet and greet. We went to the school across the street with Brenda and Harold and met Linda who likes hugs. Each day the three of them and others from the community volunteer to prepare backpacks of food items for children who otherwise would good the weekend hungry. They have fund raisers to get money and purchase food items that children can manage for breakfast and lunch.  They also get donations.  There is a man in Florida that heard about their need for food so ships items from Amazon.com for them to distribute. They get everything organized then run an assembly line to package items. The bags are then sent to the classrooms where the teachers put them in the children's backpacks so that no one is called to any attention. Time to head to Houston Fest whose mission is to hon
Read more

Pandemic

 This has been a strange year. We arrived in Florida in March and have stayed home since. That is about 6 months now. The Covid-19 virus has set the world to be a different place with stay at home orders, restaurants and bars closed, shelves in the grocery stores empty of toilet paper and antiseptic good, virtual school and doctor visits, hospitals that don’t let visitors enter and no only emergency care, wearing a mask when you are in public and people staying six feet apart. Who knows what the new world will be like after this. 
Read more

Hospital Stay to Camping Out

Image
Update: morning started early with vitals checked every four hours, bloodwork ( interesting side note: you are given an IV port in the emergency room, but that port is not used to retrieve blood for any of the various tests once you are admitted. Instead someone comes and draws blood through a new prick hole each time. ).    I started taking a new pill, Imdur, that helps keep the arteries open. It gave me a terrible headache so I won’t be taking that again!    Went for a CT angio of the chest. Then I waited       It is now 3:00 and they are going to discharge me!!    Yippie. That was about three weeks ago. Since then life has made a 360. We bought a house!! A touchspot really because we still plan to travel. We bought a new to us PleasureWay!! We are scrubbing and painting the house. It is the best way to get to know your new space. And it makes it your own. I take it slow and sit more than I remember doing in days gone by, but we are just ma
Read more