vacation and more

so folks, it's been a while. and i must apologize because this will be a picture-less post because i am not sure where my camera is packed just at this moment. it's been pretty busy for us: we closed on a condo, painted a room, went on vacation, and are packing up to move into said condo. this has been a span of a week and a half. so the camera is possibly in vacation stuff still, or has been packed into a moving box. unsure...

anyway, more on the condo later. for now, i'm thinking about vacation-time.

this year, we went to virginia. specifically, we went to shenandoah national park and hiked the appalachian trail. wow... we were initially supposed to hike 40 miles of the trail, but scaled that back to 30 once i possibly broke one of my toes. it is currently a lovely shade of "raisin" and is being nice when it is taped to the next toe. it only really hurts when i stand on my foot for a long time right now. sigh...

in any case, when we arrived in virginia, we went to this town called luray and ventured into luray caverns. this was great because it was 100 degrees outside and the caverns are naturally air conditioned :) these caverns were beautiful and spectacular. check out the web site and see for yourself! and hopefully next week i'll have some pictures for you. i highly recommend this visit to anyone who finds themselves in that area of the country. stunning, really! when we were done, we had a phenomenal dinner (start sarcasm) of rice chips, potato salad, and cucumber salad, procured at the local food lion. this was finally accomplished after driving around for about 45 minutes, past a host of fast food--of which i could not eat any of it except taco bell, and well, we're just not going there--and finding the 3 restaurants in town. i also could not eat anything at those places except the pricey one. and really, who's going to spend $18 on a stuffed portobello mushroom? i don't care if it's organic--that's just ridiculous!

anyway, bright and early the next morning, we picked up our shuttle at thornton gap and were dropped off to start hiking from swift run gap. the day's hike went from there to lewis mountain cabins. this was the first accommodations we had in the park. the three lodges were all done in the 1920s and 1930s and have a great feeling to them. in short, we got to hike up to 10 miles/day and come "home" to a bed and shower every night. it was great. this day's hike was mostly uphill from swift run gap and was a great hike through old forest growth. but man, was it hot and humid.

we arrived at lewis mountain and our cabin with a little patio and grill to cook on. we had a much better dinner of tofu burgers, roasted fingerling potatoes, mandarin oranges and van camp's pork and beans (those were for lee).

the next day we set out for big meadows lodge, and another approximately 10 mile hike. first thing on our hike, we saw a young bear that we had to scare from the trail. luckily, that was pretty easy. he was just eating away, minding his own business--but you can't really just walk up to bears. best to scare them away--especially if he was young enough for mama to be nearby. that would be a bad scene. the rest of this day's hike though was not that great. there were no views, the woods were dense and it was hard to see if there were any critters around, and i broke my toe. i just kept knocking it into roots and rocks, my own fault really, and then i hit it again and i felt a searing pain through the toe and up my foot. then lee decided to take a diversion hike down the mountain to lewis falls, essentially right below big meadows lodge. because we were almost at the end of our hike, i said ok. well, it was pretty far down the mountain, we saw no waterfall (it was not really the season for this waterfall), and then on our way back up encountered a LARGE bear. and he was not to be very deterred by our clapping, whistling, arm-waving antics. he just sat on his haunches and looked at us. he eventually lumbered away, but this was alarming because he did so very quietly and we're sure he was watching us from not far away. and he was about 500 pounds or more. male black bears can be aggressive and you do not want to mess with them. i have never hiked faster up 1000 VERTICAL FEET in my life. and yes, when we got to the top at the lodge, we saw the sign that said it was 1000 feet down. lee was not allowed to choose side diversion hikes after this.

when we got to the lodge, we saw my pretty swollen and gray toe (it was not yet ripened to it's lovely purple shade) and then the gigantic blister on the back of that foot from walking funny.

but the next morning, we got up and hiked about 9 miles to skyland resort, our final lodge stop. this hike was wonderful, with beautiful vistas, lovely rock slides, and it was a perfectly cool day with low humidity for hiking. when we got to skyland, however, i knew my hiking time was over. my foot was throbbing, my toe had turned quite purple, and that blister had become a large bloody hole in the back of my foot. lee did a great job finding a way down the mountain for us--it was still about 10 miles to the car. a great woman named carla, who worked at the lodge, took pity on us and drove us to the lot on her way home from work. THANK YOU CARLA! she really saved our vacation :)

to celebrate, for dinner in the lodge that night we ordered a bottle of wine called chateau morrisette. it was not that fantastic, really not good actually. but it was called blushing dog and was a white zinfandel. lee had to order it because it had his name. oh well. we also had a slice of ice cream pie, made with virginia blackberry ice cream. divine!

for our final day in the park, since we had the car, we drove to all the overlooks and vistas that we were missing from not doing that day's hike. lee was a nice chauffeur :) then we drove out of the park to sperryville, va, on our way to leesburg. the plan was to meander and do some virginia wine tasting. but first, in sperryville there was rumored to be a gluten free bakery. and we found it! it was just a little storefront, with really no retail part, but the woman was great! we bought a meat stromboli for lee's lunch, a spanikopita for me, and 2 cream cheese brownies. i was in heaven! and her sister lives in boston and is involved with a health food market here and has a gluten free bed and breakfast in malden! WOW!

so we meandered and drank wine, sometimes good wine, sometimes bad, and then finally came home on july 3. it was a nice trip except for the toe part. we also started reading bill bryson's a walk in the woods which was fun to read while hiking the appalachian trail. i'll tell you all about it when we're done.