Friday, November 14, 2008

Back from Virginia

We left for Virginia very early on Saturday, Nov. 1 after carefully packing the car with the few things we could fit and felt we would need to live for a week in our home there. Toodling along I 40 we stopped in New Mexico for lunch and while I was using the facilities Dave decided to check how much room we had in the trunk. Come to find out we had LOTS of room because neither of us stowed the two suitcases that contained our clothes!!!!!!!!! Crap! It was out of the question to go back 500 miles just for that, so.............. we found Wal-Mart on the way and bought just enough to get us through a few days and found a laundromat in the nearby town. Duh! We both assumed that the other had put the cases in the car and neither of us noticed them sitting in our bedroom ready to go! All I could think of is how on the reality shows like Project Runway when Kenley left her tulle at Mood and the camera zoomed in as she went on her merry way designing until much later she noticed it missing. That's the image I had when we discovered NO CLOTHES FOR TWO WEEKS! As we say here: there's always a story! Here is our lonely luggage right where I left them Oct. 31 in the bedroom!

The picture below is taken from the gravel road a bit from the house. The green building is the barn located behind our house so we actually live somewhere amongst those trees in the center of the picture behind the farm:

The Maple trees had shed their leaves, but the oaks and elms still had theirs interspersed among the pine trees. Our property has four types of oak trees, pine, and a few maple and elm. We could hear quite a few squirrels running through the dead leaves looking for acorns on our property. One afternoon I got close enough to one in a tree eating his lunch! Dave had a stare down with a couple of deer while raking the leaves from the street and we saw a buck (and heard him snorting) after dark at the edge of the "lawn." Here is one of the smaller critters we saw. I used to know the adage about figuring the strength of the winter according to the amount of brown on the caterpillar, but that was sooooooo long ago. If you can help jog my memory I'd appreciate it. Hopefully when we return in the summer we will see some of the beautiful Monarch butterflies:

This is the same signpost in the slide show above however the oak tree is much prettier now!

This next picture gives a pretty good idea of how tall the trees are surrounding the house.

One of the great things about being at the house was the quiet! We don't really have any neighbors per se (we don't count the deer, squirrels, crows, and the black bear one of the "neighbors" saw in his backyard), we are the only house on Laurel Ridge Lane. Our street intersects with Millstone Rd. (gravel) and there are several houses on this road, but they are all set back in the woods. No traffic, no neighbors' crappy music, no air force jets, no train whistles, no dogs barking, no kids walking by bouncing basketballs......... just the wind rustling the leaves at the tops of the trees, crows cawing in the distance, squirrels running through the dead leaves....... it is so quiet there that we could actually hear the oak leaves hit the ground when they fell from the trees!
The weather was in the 50s-60s and not much sunlight in the early morning and late afternoon because of the tree cover, but it was really nice to be in the cooler weather. The previous owner for some reason had not put registers in the bedrooms so it was a good thing we brought a portable heater and a warm blanket (for our air mattress!).
We really found out how much stuff we DID NOT NEED back there. We had two bar stools for the kitchen, bought two camping chairs to sit outside in, an air mattress on the floor, a refrigerator, and a range. We DID NOT have any couches, microwave, toaster, TV, computer, more than 3 days worth of clothes, etc. But, we made do for a week with what we had!
Next trip will be at the end of May next year where I will be staying for as long as possible before I have to go back to work!

1 comment:

Cindy said...

You will have to order some bird and wildlife identification books from paperbackswap :)))