Shenandoah Valley

July 23, 2010

Our campground at Verona held a lot of promise...that largely went unfufilled. All that beauty was overshadowed by events and attitude. So most of the week was spent in-house working, or driving futility trying to find things. But then came Friday.

After getting our work out of the way, we drove south to Lexington, VA. This is a gem! The town is just lovely and would be a good day trip if that were all there was. However, it holds so much history, that is the reason for visiting. We drove through VMI - huge! We missed the museum, but learned that it was burned to the ground, along with most of Lexington, by Sherman; seems he lit more than Atlanta. We walked through a small portion of Washington and Lee University to visit the Lee Chapel. He was buried below the chapel in the cript built for his family, with Traveller just outside in the garden. The room above the cript and just behind the altar contains a lifesized statue of Lee in repose that is really beautiful. Lee was president of the university for the last 5 years of his life and completely innovated their curriculum during that time. His son was an instructor at VMI, and later became president at Washington Lee. We also visited the home of Stonewall Jackson, also an instructor at VMI for the 2 years he lived there. We really enjoyed the afternoon there.

We got back to camp to find a whole new rowdy place. It seems the weekend party starts early, a fact we missed since our arrival was on Monday morning. On Friday we were glad to be leaving before the place filled up and more partying got started. We must be getting very old!

Leaving, we turned left.

Now all week we had turned right on US 11, taking care of business. I wonder how different our stay would have been if we had just turned left earlier. The most amazing homes and hillsides were just waiting there to be discovered. Green upon green, rolling, gentle, graceful, amazing. While riding along, I was trying to compose this paragraph and knew for sure that my vocabulary was too limited, or maybe the language is not beautiful enough to explain what we saw. But the whole day was like that. We traveled north on I-81 through West Virgina, then Maryland, taking a left in southern Pennsylvania.

Today we are heading over to Gettysburg, prepared to be awed.