We had a great visit with Joe & Jac and their awesome friends who let us crash their vacation at a nice rented house on Chesapeake Bay.
Thanks to the huge stack of games, we were all well occupied into the late hours of the night. I highly recommend Cards Against Humanity (a darker version of Apples to Apples) and best of all, it's free! We parted with Joe & Jac on Saturday morning and scooted over to Annapolis to *finally* see Tom's old stomping ground. We walked all over campus, saw Tom's old dorm and the chapel and the Herndon monument. It was all much smaller and cozier than I ever pictured. We also walked into the tiny downtown and along the circle that surrounds the Capital. It was a lovely, sunny day too.
After Annapolis, we started our drive over to Seneca Rocks by way of Shenandoah National Park. It added a considerable amount of time to our drive but the views were great:
Our extended drive got us to the campground in Seneca a little later than planned, but we met up with Curtis's cousin Llewy at the local hotspot, if you can call it that. The general store was reminiscent of Hussey's in Washington, ME (just minus the wedding dresses) and the pizza place was packed with hungry, cold climbers. Sandwiches would have been faster, but I'd been thinking about that pizza all day while driving along twisty, windy roads up and down through the mountains. So we ordered a pizza and went back to the campsite to get a very finicky fire going. The boys went back to fetch the pizza after 40 minutes or so while I tended the fire, but they were gone a long time. Their story goes like this: when they showed up they saw our pizza ready on the counter but the waitress insisted that our pizza had just gone in the oven and would take another 20 minutes. So they waited 20 minutes until the owner came out and said "Your pizza's been sitting here ready for 20 minutes". Awesome. When they handed it over, Llewy thought to check about the meat situation where he discovered that pepperoni (cleverly camouflaged in cheese) covered the pizza. When they pointed this out to the owner he insisted we had ordered pepperoni and then told about how he once kicked out a group of vegetarians for complaining that they found sausage on their pizza. And something about raising beef cattle. I'm not sure about that part. They were nice enough to throw in a sandwich for me, but Curtis had to actually go into the kitchen to supervise since they weren't sure what do put in a veggie sandwich. Yikes. Moral of the story: Peppers stands for pepperoni in Seneca Rocks, WV. And I probably should have just ordered the sandwich to begin with.
We got up early Sunday morning expecting to battle the crowds for a route, but apparently Seneca climbers are a bunch of sleepy heads. We had our choice of routes and climbed a 3 pitch route up to a ledge, then scrambled to an upper ledge where we did another 2 pitches to the summit. Not a bad day in the sun.
View from the top of our first climb. I think it looks like a puzzle scene :)
North Summit
Views from the top
Seneca Rocks North and South summit
Curtis and Llewy on the summit
The rock is like a big shark fin, so the summit was rather narrow and had great views of the surrounding area. Curtis and I stuck around to climb on Monday too after the weekend crowd had gone home, and then started to wind our way over to Bridgedale to see Ginny. We camped out on the somewhere on the way and had a nice leisurely breakfast of blueberry scones from a mix that Missy sent. They were delicious!
Blueberry and sour cream scones
We drove over to the George Washington National Forest looking for some nice hiking, but found this instead!
I call this: My life as a praying mantis
And a possibly feral dog. But I won't get into that. We had our first night of camping where it hadn't been raining, it wasn't currently raining, and it was warm enough to sit outside after dark so Curtis got a rip roaring fire going. About time!
We met up with Ginny on Wednesday and went out to lunch with her and Hunter at a tasty place in Harrisonburg. We were able to clean ourselves up and run some errands to restock our pantry too before diving back into the great outdoors. Ginny had some guest passes, so we got to stick around a bit longer and have dinner with her too before setting off to find our campsite for the night.
Now we're in New River Gorge in West Virginia where there is some great climbing, but it's a little chilly and overcast so we're going to wind our way over to Red River Gorge in Kentucky to take advantage of the sunshine for the weekend and do some climbing where the rock is warm enough to feel our fingers!
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