Well we are back on the mountain at the cabin after a whirlwind trip that we drove nearly 2000 miles in 8 days. It was a good trip visiting with family and friends and seeing some new places along the way as well as making new friends with some of our airbnb hosts. The mountains in the Shenandoah Valley are completely different from the ones we have here in the Carolinas; but we feel so close to them as opposed to the flat lands of Ohio and Michigan. I must say I've never seen so many lakes as we saw in the Michigan area. Most all of the roads in those two states are horrible with pot hole, ruts, manhole covers and just plain rough. I know it's because of the winter weather with snow and ice as well as the salt they use to keep the ice from freezing, oh well.
We spent the last three nights and days at sister Dee's beautiful house in Woodstock and as an added bonus was able to visit with her youngest daughter Kelly Lynn and her three youngun's of which we had never met the littlest one. They were so precious and caused us to miss our 5 grands. We also saw one of our long lost cousins Clint Jones and his girl friend who came to Winchester for the reunion of which we missed because we were in Michigan. I also got to see for a few minutes another old dear friend who was just a pre school age when I worked for her father at the farm market. She now helps run a Civil War Museum at the New Market battle field. We took a 5 minute walk through it and wow I have never seen so much memorabilia from the war as well as from the Indian era. Next year I want to spend a day there; its that full of nearly everything related to both eras. She also blessed us with two pints of homemade apple butter the Cather family make each year.
Well we are back at the cabin after stopping for lunch at Wendy's in Hillsville and at Walmart in Galax for groceries and to fill up with gas at 2.49; a far cry from 3.29 in Michigan. After unloading and checking the gardens which seem to have survived the 2 1/2 inches of rain showing in my rain gauge I harvested a couple of cucumbers and moved some flowering plants back onto the porches all of which looked even better than when I removed them last week. The lettuces have gone to seed but I will be able to salvage some for salads and I noticed some of the cherry 'maters are starting to turn. These are a little larger than the regular small ones but have such a great taste. The pepper plants are showing some good fruit as well as is the jalapeno.
I fired up the riding mower and spent the next close to three hours mowing all of the yards which had grown several inches. I will weed whack this morning as the grasses will have lots of dew. The flowers in the circle bed are doing quite well with all of the zinnias showing color and a few of the cosmos as well. Nancy picked a quart of blueberries which finally ripened, we will have blue berry cakes this morning with some of the vacuumed packed bacon we picked up in Edinburg, Va. on our way south. This bacon is the best ever from Wholesome Foods which is a huge distributor just south of Woodstock.
After a quick light supper we took off on a hike to the top of the mountain and visited with the Brownings. We are delighted to see that Joe is recovering after a week or so of some health issues related to his fall injuring his hand. It's still swells and shows some redness when ever he uses it and we think his issues came from the antibiotics he was using to combat the infection. He looks awesome and was back to eating once again and showed so much color. We headed on across the mountain as the evening shadows showed such darkness in the back woods. It's almost a fall evening and we noticed the day are really getting much shorter with winter just a few months away.
Well that was about it for the day as I settled into some mail and a couple more birthday cards as well as the local paper before tuning into the Ray's on the internet. They won again over Kansas City at home. It wasn't long the hot shower felt good and we love out mountain water which smell and tastes so good. The water in Ohio and Michigan were less than desirable with the smell of sulphur and iron which made it undrinkable as well as for showering, oh well. It's like the song goes"nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning" plus it 52 this morning, yikes that's winter for Florida so I got our the flannels shirts, LATER
