Road Trip Photos - May 2016

Rockfall next to the road.

High water on the river.

Spring is here and rapidly moving towards summer.  That means I am back out on the road again.  I was surprised when I came home and downloaded my pictures from the camera to find that I had snapped almost a hundred photos.  It was all the more surprising because there are so many trees I felt that I was missing a lot of good shots.  I was thinking, "Darn, I'm not going to have any photos worth showing when I get home.  Some of the pictures I take are blurry because we are moving or because in the mountains the roads are bumpy.  A lot of shots I miss just because I cannot get a good angle on them while riding in a car.  I try to only ask a few (ok several) times for my husband to stop the car for a shot.  I am sure that it is annoying to my husband, the driver, and it would take forever to get there if I stopped everywhere to take a picture.  He is a good sport about it though. 

Early morning sunlight.  Photo by my husband.

Old home and barn by the road.

It had been raining a lot in Virginia in May.  The rivers are as swollen from the rain as if it were early spring when the snow melts.   When we were up there last month, the river and creeks were kind of low and everything was dry.  My car windows were so covered with dust that I could not see out the rear window.  However, this month it was exactly the opposite.  We were dealing with muddy roads and potholes filled with water.  Getting up the hill was a challenge.  There are so many people going up our road now that there were some deep ruts.  I ended up purchasing about four hundred and fifty pounds of rock from Lowes and also hauling about a hundred pounds of gravel from the stream.  My efforts are starting to pay off.  A lot of the road is holding up well in spite of the rain.  There is still a lot of road that needs some rock.  We are thinking about bringing up a dump truck load of rock.  I am not enthused about that because none of the neighbors help maintain the road.  I will be shoveling that load pretty much by myself.  It would be cheaper to buy a load than to buy small lots of rock, but at least I can work on it as I feel like it.  I always feel that buying rock to bring up there is like bringing coal to Newcastle since there is so much rock up there.

Hay in the field.  Lots of hay.

Speaking of rock, there has been a significant amount of rockfall up there along the road.  The road runs past and through huge boulders.  Part of the rock ledge was blasted to make a way for the road.  That rock has stood there for years, but it is becoming brittle and developing cracks due to freezing and thawing during the winter.  We have noticed significant rockfall in the area.  Rock is doing what rock does naturally.  It just seems that a lot of rock is falling where it had been more stable before.  I have been observing the same rocks for about fifty years up there and I am seeing much more rock down than has been in the past.  It just goes to show:  if you wait long enough even rocks will change. 

Old cabins converted to shops.

Building in a small town.

Traveling back and forth to the mountains is an experience on the allergy front too.  When we go up in April, spring is in full bloom here, but as we move inland and upward in elevation the flora changes.  As we move inland and upwards in elevation the plants are not blooming nearly as much.  At the elevation of the cabin, the trees are still bare and there are only a few early wildflowers such as Trillium blooming and the grass is green.  After staying there for a week with only a little vegetation blooming we come back down to full spring.  The difference in the pollen levels really causes a big allergy attack.  When we go up in May, all the trees have finished releasing their pollen here and their seeds have set here.  Up there, the leaves on the trees are at the end of that bright yellow-green color of spring and the Iris are blooming.  When we come back down a week later, wild rose and honeysuckle are blooming everywhere along the roadside and the fields are filled with hay that is in the flowering state.  By the time you get back down to where we live soybeans and corn are coming up.  It takes us two or three days to get back to normal from all the changes in the levels of pollen.

On the way to the cabin.

Weather can be a big change too.  The first three days there it was cold and rainy and temperatures never got out of the mid-fifties. (Temperatures in Fahrenheit, (about 12.77 C.)  The rest of the time the temperatures were in the mid-seventies F. (about 23 C.).  We were wearing long sleeve shirts during the evening and sleeping under slight blankets at night.  It was a shock to the system to come home to upper eighties F.(31 C.) with close to 90% humidity.  I am not sure I have finished adjusting to the hot weather yet.  Yesterday was a little better.

Anyway, while we were at the cabin, we tackled renovating the downstairs bedroom.  More on that next blog post.  After that, I will be back to blogging about my folk art lamb project.