holiday weekend

We just got back from a camping trip to one of our favorite weekend-fling destinations: Rocky Knob, VA. What could be nicer than a four-day weekend? Day 1: Rest, sleep. Hang out with friends. Day 2: Leave for trip in a leisurely fashion. Hike. Camp. Eat strange foods. Sleep outside. Day 3: Wake up in the woods. Walk. Ogle. Meander homewards through various small mountain towns. Sleep in own bed. Day 4: Rest, sleep. Hang out with friends.

Besides all this relaxation, my personal goal for the car-ride part of the trip was to learn to make a sock toe-up. You can see my progress above. I haven't gotten to the heel yet; I was too busy gaping at interesting scenery to do a lot of knitting on this trip. I am looking forward to learning the "afterthought heel" technique. Have any of y'all tried it?

Of course, the knitting took a back seat to the journeying this time. Rocky Knob is less than 3.5 hours away from here, through beautiful foothill & mountain country, so it's a great destination for a quick camping trip. Once you get there, there's a big, quiet campground for car camping and lots & lots to do. Here's a picture of the trail that leads from the campground up to the Rocky Knob overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It zig-zags in & out of a cow pasture that looks sort of magical with all these funny stones sticking up everywhere. I kept imagining that leprechauns were about to hop out from behind one of them.

Here's one of HWWLLB's sunset photos from the Saddle Overlook, where we were among a handful of goggle-eyed couples snuggling and watching the sunset:



We didn't have too much luck building a roaring fire at our campsite, but considering it's July in Virginia, a roaring fire wasn't really a necessity. We did get it going well enough to make some really tasty s'mores though. In the morning we didn't bother with another fire, so I had to get my cup of tea at the Tuggle's Gap restaurant, before we headed down the Parkway to North Carolina:


the morning light was lovely; this is around 8 AM. to the right, just outside the frame, there are about three dozen harleys lined up waiting to blast the morning silence. but not just yet.

We headed south, past the new Blue Ridge Music Center, and into North Carolina. We had to make a stop in Sparta, where I learned that there's a fiddlers' convention coming up at the end of the month - we may need to go back for that.

After the errand in Sparta we took a detour back up over the Virginia border to visit Galax, home of the very famous annual fiddlers' convention in August. We'd heard there was a "festival" going on there and imagined old-timey music, lots of tasty food and maybe some Virginia wine. When we got there, we found a chintzy-looking traveling carnival, with nothing old-timey or even edible in sight. Not to mention the carnival rides didn't even open til 5 PM, and we were still a good ways from home. To make matters worse, there are clearly evil commies afoot in Galax:


evidence of the coming revolution

You can bet we high-tailed it out of there! (Actually, we were just hungry, but that makes the story less dramatic). From Galax we spent three or four hours meandering eastwards along Route 58, up and down the foothills, and then slowly winding southwards towards home. The cats were ecstatic to see us when we got home. We were ecstatic to sleep in our own bed, and then wake up to yet another glorious day off before this long weekend is over. Hooray!