Our Trip to Virginia – Part II
I woke up at about 2am thinking about things. The bed we slept in had a head board that was very much like mine at home. My left arm was stretched above my head and I guess my hand was sort of grasping one of the brass poles on the headboard just as I sometimes do when I sleep at home. I was still half asleep and as my thoughts progressed our vacation review popped into my mind, “Whew, Hopeful1 made it to the house on time for us to make it to the plane, but the taxi had been late.” Then, I thought, we had still made the plane on time and we had driven through the fog to a lodge. But then what had happened, I wondered… what happened on the rest of our vacation?? Wait a minute? Where am I?
The room was pitch black and I was slowly coming to my senses a little more.
Am I in that lodge now?
I couldn’t feel Hopeful1 in the bed next to me because we’re both pretty small now so we don’t collide in bed at all and, at home, in my own bed, we have a king sized bed so there are times when my husband and I don’t collide either.
Well, if I’m in the lodge, then there should be a wooden wall next to me… I reached out my right hand – smack…. There was the wall…
Dang, for a minute there I thought I had Alzheimer’s disease and had lost a whole vacation…. Just a big black hole and now it was time to get up for work again.
I inched my way out of bed and toward the bathroom but I had to turn on a light to find it (of course disturbing Hopeful1 – don’t worry, she got me back over the next couple of nights). Since I had awakened her anyway, I asked her if I could borrow her toothpaste. (I HAVE to brush my teeth EVERY TIME I wake up in the middle of the night and I had forgotten my tooth paste LOL.) Disgusted and annoyed, she said I could borrow it and to leave her alone so she could go back to sleep.
After that, I woke up again, probably at about 4 or 5 am est. After all, I’m used to getting up pretty early our time. I drifted in and out until the sun was presumably up, but it was hard to tell because of all the fog. Plus it was pouring. You couldn’t see the rain, but you could sure hear it. I lay in bed looking out the windows at the other side of the room, trying to make out anything besides fog through them and watching a wasp buzz around between the screen and the glass on the right window, not terribly concerned he would fly into our actual room, but a little concerned.
“Great,” I thought, “If this keeps up we won’t be able to go horseback riding.” But I was determined that we would at least hike down by the falls. I had bought Coleman disposable rain ponchos for Hopeful1 and me (duh, didn’t get one for my brother) as my brother had advised (I figured he had one).
When Hopeful1 seemed at least a little bit awake I said, “There’s a wasp on the inside of our window.”
She answered, “So?”
“I just wanted to give you the news. I can’t give you the weather because it’s too foggy for me to see what it’s like outside and it’s raining too loudly for me to hear if the birds are singing.”
“Thanks,” she said and rolled over to ignore me.
I couldn’t get back to sleep because an alarm in the room next to us had gone off and there was nobody in it to turn it off (or they were dead or were sleeping through it). Finally my brother woke up too and knocked on our adjoining door asking if we were ready for breakfast. I was more than ready… bored with lying in bed and waiting for signs of life. We threw on clothes and headed down to the restaurant area of the lodge. Sitting us by the windows, we were able to watch the fog as we ate a delicious omelet.
Actually we could see a little more than we had the night before, but certainly not much… there was a slate covered terrace area with some foliage that we could look over, but mostly we could see that the rain was still coming down, sadly washing away our hopes of horseback riding. We ate breakfast leisurely, then debated whether to hike the local caverns (which would have required some driving but would have been indoors) or to hike to the nearby, assuredly beautiful, but very rainy falls. Either way, we wanted to make it back to Solomon’s Island in time for our wine and cheese boat ride. We finally decided to do the falls hike.
First we went to the little gift shop where my brother got a poncho and sweetly bought me a wonderful Shenandoah sweatshirt and an adorable hat for Hopeful1. Then we went back to our room and “suited up” for our nautical hike (just kidding, not nautical, just wet). We drove to where the Dark Hollow Falls Trails began and selected Trail A, the easier, shorter trail. It was wonderful!
and earthy browns like a beautiful wall paper and carpet around us. We hiked down down down spiraling around following the path of the water until, at last, we came upon the falls. They descended beautifully as a reward for our little bit of effort to get there.
Hopeful1 and I hiked a little further down the trail, but I told her I didn’t want to use up all my energy so that I’d have trouble climbing back up. I went back and joined my brother on a rock by the falls. She climbed a bit further then joined the two of us. Several times during our hike my brother stopped us and told us to just listen to every sound we could hear, count them, identify them (he reminded me of the dad in my Muffet diary – on the Grand Canyon trip LOL). And there WERE wonderful sounds, drops of water on leaves and all different kinds of birds nagging, singing, cajoling. But the overriding sound was that of the water, rushing to the falls then spilling over and crashing onto the rocks.
In many ways, for me, the climb back up was easier than the climb down. In all that dampness, my knees were really sensitive to all that downward motion. After these weeks at Starbucks rushing around in the mornings and hoisting full coffee urns etc, I had no problem hiking up the steep trail. For the first time in my life, I found myself able to do something physically taxing more easily than my brother! That had absolutely NEVER happened before. This is a guy who ran to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up again in eight hours flat! BUT, he has been working 18 hour days lately with no time at the gym. He’s put on a few (very few) pounds, and I’ve taken off quite a few, so this amazing thing has happened. I’m sure it won’t be long before he’ll be outdoing me again. He’s pretty competitive and has a solid foundation of fitness.
After coming back from the hike, we each showered and cleaned up, then we checked out and hopped in the car to head back towards Solomon’s. Of course, the fog had slightly lifted and we could actually see the area as we were driving out, unlike the way it looked when we had driven in the night before.
We stopped at a cute little antique and gift shop and bought a few things for the folks back home. We bought pumpkin butter and apple candy and super hot bbq sauce along with some hand painted earrings, a teddy bear, and some apples to munch on in the car. Then we started driving in earnest. We knew it was going to be a long drive and we didn’t want to be too late for our boat ride.
The drive started out fun, with lots of chatter and catching up. After all, we hadn’t all been together since December when we had our little excursion to Key West, so we had lots to talk about. Also, the area was so beautiful, once the fog lifted a bit, there was so much to see. Unfortunately, however, several hours into the trip, the traffic got really bad… rush hour outside of Washington D.C. on a Friday is UGLY! That made us all about cranky and frantic PLUS we all had to go to the bathroom. We finally pulled off, got some gasoline, used the restroom and stretched. The sky was black, the rain was falling. My brother got on his cell to call about the boat ride… it wasn’t going to happen. The wind was howling on Solomon’s. It wasn’t going to be safe to take a boat out there this evening, much less wine and cheese! *sigh* We’d still be staying in the lovely bed and breakfast he wanted us to experience, but at least the pressure was off on rushing through this traffic. That lightened our mood a bit.
We calmly got past some drawbridge section of this drive, which seemed to be the biggest hold up, I guess some car was disabled there and caused it to be brought down to one lane. Once we were past that point, things sped up and we were off again. After great lengths, we arrived at the Blue Herron Bed & Breakfast.