It has been a difficult year and a half for everyone. One of the things we missed in 2020 was our annual road trip. This year, we are spending a lot of time with our daughter and her family. So this trip is rather disjointed. It will not be our usual week marathon, as in the past. But I plan to document as much of it as may be of interest to any of my dedicated readers.
We begin this trip with heavy hearts. This will be our very first road trip without our beloved Beamer who crossed over the Rainbow Bridge in October of 2020. He was an enthusiastic traveler, always eager to jump into the back seat and go wherever we decided to go. And in his travels, he visited all 48 of the continental states (many multiple times) and all 9 southern continental provinces of Canada. And he left a special gift everywhere he went, for the enjoyment of other friends who after him. This year, the presence of our loyal will be sorely missed.
We take to the road today, with Satellite Beach in our mirror, and head north to North Carolina to spend the summer with our daughter and her girls. We pray for safe travels and blessings from above a we venture forth.
We have been here in North Carolina for almost 6 weeks. And, believe it or not, it is hotter and more humid here than it is back home. Steve spent about four weeks cleaning, prepping, and the hundreds of feet of fencing that surrounds the back property. And now that it is finished, it looks fantastic. In addition, he has taken on a number of handyman projects around the house, fixing, restoring, and sprucing up projects that have been neglected until now. In addition, he has spent countless hours at pool watching over Natalie and Danielle, every week day, as they took lessons and trained for swim meets. I became the family chauffeur, the cook, the housekeeper and the shopper. And my prize project was to manually sand the stain off of the front porch bench and refinish it to a new sparkling specimen.
For the next two weeks, the kids will be tied up in summer camp and other activities, so Michelle has sent us on a vacation up north. We will be off to visit family and friends in Maine and Massachusetts.
We left Apex this morning at 9 AM and headed north. Today and tomorrow are travel daysno time for And with the help of GPS (something Steve has little confidence in) we landed in Chambersburg, PA for the night. Our circuitous route north is designed to avoid which can be a source of much consternation for many reasons. We drove back roads most of the way and witnessed life as it is in the mountains of Virginia. There are no housing developments in these parts. Homes, many of which are ranches built of brick, are situated on acres of land, tucked in the trees, with neatly mowed lawns. We passed through town after town where the people of the heartland of this country live and work. The valleys and the hollows were filled with fog and the smoke that has drifted east from the wild fires out west. I understand that it has made it all the way to Washington DC and NY. The smoke gave an eerie look as it blanketed the hills and dales of Virginia. We saw many distilleries and wineries, most of which were located in the Rockfish Valley area. We will need to do some research on this and file it for future reference when we have time to stop and visit a few of these places. We drove passed the entrance to the Shenandoah National Park, a place we have visited in the past and on to which trails north through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and up into New York State.
We landed in Chambersburg, PA at 5 PM after a Walmart visit, which took us off the beaten path just a bit. After a nice salad from Cracker Barrel, we are hunkering down for a while before taking to our bed for a good nights rest. Tomorrow, we will head to the Hartford area for our second night on the road before arriving in Maine.
Today was a second travel day.
