Cabin Trip and Photos from the Road - October 2017

On the road in the rain.

Once again, we are heading to the cabin in the rain.  I am not sad about this.  We have had a very dry period up here.  We needed the rain.  Everything has been very dusty.  It just seems that every time we head up there that it has rained.    At least the rain had cleared by the time we reached the mountains.

New hay in the barn.

We were up at the cabin for a week.  October is a wonderful time to be at the cabin.  The daytime weather is still fairly warm and the nights are cool.  You can really tell that the climate change is happening though.  It used to be that the second week in October was the height of leaf color up there.  Everyone wanted to be up there then.  This year there is very little color so far.  The leaves are still green.  They seem to be turning from green to brown and then just dropping.  Even the sugar maples, which drop their leaves sooner than some of the other species, still have some leaves on them.

Cloudy sky.

On our last trip up, the apples were not quite ready to pick.  This trip many of the apples were on the ground.  There were still plenty to pick though.  I brought home two crates of apples.  This year the apples were smaller than usual.  I think the dry conditions had a lot to do with that.  Although some  states have been dealing with hurricanes, record breaking rainfall and flooding some areas of Virginia have been dealing with a dry spell.  We went twenty days without any rain; and in areas where it did rain, it was only a brief sprinkle.  This clearly affected the size of the apples. 

The cow statue is still there.

The apple tree had hundreds of apples on it. Some of them were so high up that we could not reach them even with the apple picking basket on a tall stick.   It is amazing how much fruit just one tree can produce.  The ground under the tree was so thick with fallen and rotting apples that it was difficult to walk among them. The decaying apples attracted yellow jackets.  I had to rake up the downed apples and move them before we could begin to pick.  I raked them into a long line and then started shoveling them into the wheel barrow.  It took six barrow loads to get all the apples under just half the tree.  Fortunately, the yellow jackets were so drunk on the fermenting fruit that they were very docile.  They weren't in a mood to fight and would just move off while I was raking up the apples.

Very little color in the trees yet.

There were yellow jackets down below as well.  We took a day off from our labors and went to the Wine and Garlic festival.  I had not yellow jackets flying around at the festival before.  Just to check and make sure memory was not misleading me  I asked my husband whether this was a trick of memory and he agreed with me that the yellow jackets were not usual in this number and that we had not seen previously them in the festival area before.  Usually, it is a little cooler this time of year.  We normally are in a long sleeve shirt or are wearing a fleece, but this year everyone was in short sleeves.

Old barn is still standing.

The festival was wonderful as usual: good wine, good food, and good music, and of course lots of garlic.  Garlic samples are served raw.  You can go from booth to  booth and sample many different types of garlic and garlic flavored products. Some garlic is mild, some hot and peppery.  Some people sample to buy for home use, others are there to purchase bulbs for planting.  Eating raw garlic is part of the fun of this festival.  There is a reason that the slogan for this festival is "It's chic to reek."  Yes, you had better like garlic if you want to come to this festival, or at least plan on eating some in self defense.  My neighbor once said that when his relatives returned from the festival and got out of the car that he could smell the garlic coming off of them from a quarter of an acre away.

This year they were serving samples of black garlic.  I had not seen it there before.  Black garlic is an interesting product.  It is made by heating bulbs of garlic in humidity controlled conditions for up to forty days.  The garlic is heated between 140 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 77 C.)  Over time, it turns black.  Although it is sometimes referred to as fermented, it is not a true microbial action.  The process is a Maillard reaction, the same action that gives flavor to meat by browning it.  (Information source: Wikipedia).  The result of this process is a bulb of black garlic.  The taste that is somewhat sweet and carame-like with a slight under taste of charcoal.  At least this is my impression of it. 

After the festival, we spent our week working at the cabin.  Although there are still lots of leaves on the trees, the yard needed to be raked.  When I was a child, I used to love playing in piles of leaves.  Now it is one of those chores that I don't look forward to anymore; raking up tarp after tarp full of leaves.  By the time we are done, we are bone weary.  On some level, I am sure that it is good for us to work so hard, but it does not seem that way while we are doing it.  Especially since we are up there for such a limited amount of time.  We feel the pressure of a deadline of trying to get the task completed before we have to leave.  It makes us work harder and faster.

I'd like to say that we are closing in on improvements to the cabin, but somehow I think there is always going to be some project on the horizon.  This trip my husband removed all the peeling drywall tape in the attic, replaced it, plastered it and sanded it.  When the plaster was dry, he painted the ceiling.  This was an even bigger task than it sounds.  First off, the ceiling slopes down from the high point down to a knee wall.  He can only stand in the very center of the space.  There is also furniture up there as well as cabinets storing all sorts of small items that are needed at the cabin:  nails and plumbing parts and all that sort of stuff.   All of that had to be moved from side to side as he worked on the ceiling.  Even though it was covered, the furniture had to be cleaned up afterwards because of all the sanding dust. Now that this task has been finished, the attic is now ready for new flooring to go in over the plywood underlayment.  That won't be happening until next spring.  

When we left, we drained the plumbing in preparation for winter.  We hope to make one more trip up before the cabin is closed for the winter.  However, you can't trust the weather up there.  There have already been freeze warnings issued for that area of the state.  We don't want to have the weather change and have a hard freeze happen before we get a chance to get there.  My husband's next vacation days won't be until the week of Thanksgiving and it is very possible that there could be a hard freeze before that.  One year we went up planning to stay for a week a little before Thanksgiving and the temperature was forecast to drop to minus five degrees F (-20.55 C).  After all the work we have done on the cabin, we don't want to risk having a plumbing problem.  We will have to drain the plumbing again if we make another trip.  

I have added a few of our photos taken from the road.  Even though there are only a couple of routes to take to the cabin, the scenes are always changing.  We look for some landmarks that are like old friends.  The fiberglass cow that stands in front of a cattle farm is one of those landmarks.  I think that one time the cow was up for sale, but it is still standing there.  Perhaps they changed their minds or perhaps they found that some things don't sell very well.  Enjoy the photos.