Virginia

Here are some photos from our trip east to the mountains of Virginia. We left last Saturday and drove out through eastern Kentucky, a small slice of West Virginia and then into Virginia. John and Sandy have a time-share at a resort named Massanutten near the town of Harrisonburg.

On Sunday we drove over to Barboursville to visit a winery where Jeremy, the son of a good friend of Sandy, is a chef. The winery is on the grounds of an old plantation that was the former home of a governor of Virginia (from the early 1800s). We did a wine tasting and took a tour of the winery. Unfortunately we were unable to eat at the restuarant there because it was far out of our price range.

The next day we went over to see Judy & John that the Schiavi's know from New Jersey and we all went on a hike along a stretch of the Appalachian Trail. It was quite a hike (at least for us), we hiked past a few vistas that were close to 4,000 ft high. The hike ended at a group of rocks called the Humpback, and I had some scrambling over the rocks.

On our last day, we went to Jeremy's house for lunch, and to meet his wife Grayson and their daughter Nora. Since we did not get to eat at his restaurant, Jeremy was kind enough to serve us a couple of dishes that are on the menu there. After that Kate and I drove into Charlottesville to meet up with Richard, who is a first-year student at the University of Virginia.

We had a little time to kill before meeting up with Richard, so I dragged Kate to a bike shop (hey, she had gone to knitting shop that morning, so it was only fair).

Richard gave us a nice tour of part of UVA's campus and then we went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner.

The next day, we packed up and drove home through the mountains in constant rain.


I did get couple of rides in while we were there, and while I did not ride up in the mountains (I only had my cross bike with me and the 2 gears on it were not low enough for mountain climbing), I found some cool back country dirt roads to ride on.