Virginia Girls' trip

I have been itching to write for a while.  We are in the midst of

setting up a lot of travel for sabbatical next year and with all that planning, booking, thinking, exploring of destinations, hotels, flights, trains, cars, Air bnbs, and everything else, I feel like the adventure has already started.  Let’s face it, planning travel from the safety and comfort of your home can sometimes be better than the actual travel….or at least it feels like it sometimes.  With all of the planning in foreign countries for travel, it was easy to overlook easy little trips around the United States.  There were no passports involved, no currency exchange, no flights, just some nice drives for a girls’ weekend plus

 to Virginia, a wedding in Des Moines and a trip to Chicago.  First, the trip to Virginia was a driving trip with Sheila, Marsha and Rosie with me in the car and we met Gloria in Virginia at her daughter’s bed and breakfast.  Let me start by saying that every map function on any smartphone needs to do something about driving in the mountains.  It didn’t seem to matter which app we used, everyone took us down winding, twisting roads that we didn’t have to be on and one time took us to the middle of a residential street that it tried to say was a

brewery.  We were pretty sure it wasn’t a brewery though….but other than that, it was a great time.  There are so many wineries in the area with great views of the Blue Ridge, we got to see Monticello and I had to find a “wand” on the ground for Oscar so that he could have wands from Mt. Vernon and Monticello.  We had beautiful weather in April and it was so nice to see flowers blooming and spring happening and hearing about snow again in Michigan….the Orchard House bed and breakfast was great and in a tiny town that happened to have the

best Italian food that I have ever eaten outside of Italy.  And when I say “tiny”, I’m talking 300 people tiny, but maybe the chef at Vito’s came from a similarly small town in Italy because we went back there twice for more of the great food.  Middle of nowhere, but only 20 or so miles from Charlottesville with a distillery nearby that has one of the top 20 whiskies in the world.  It was really a surreal trip in that respect.  Awesome things just jumped out from everywhere like the

great breakfasts that we had, the beautiful falls that were right behind Lovingston, (Crabtree Falls, I think) and time out at the fire pit to talk and spend time together.  Except for passing up a chance to drive 15 miles out of our way and see the Flight 93 memorial, we hit high notes throughout the

trip.  Devil’s Backbone was the brewery and Rosie’s nephew was their main cook, so we ate for free and I think I had a flight of 10 beers.  Apparently, Michigan needs to up their game on the number of pours in a flight.  And the fact that there were 10 beers that I wanted to try was amazing, because they’re not hops crazy down there.