Wednesday, July 12, 2017

To There and Back Again

As I mentioned last time, I was recently in West Virginia visiting with my mother. Here are a few pictures from the trip.

Although we drove through rain most of the way, were still able to make decent time--7 hours with stops.


It was still raining when we got there, so we spent a while outside with my mother just listening to and watching the rain. It was very pleasant and yet another thing that you don't think about missing until you realize it through someone else's perspective.


My mother's nursing home is on a hill surrounded by woods. There is a paved walking path outside that we took her on 2-3 times a day. We saw lots of birds, bunnies, deer, and this millipede. After seeing this creepy-crawly, I figured out the difference between a centipede and a millipede. Centipedes usually have one pair of legs attached to each segment. Millipedes usually have two pair of legs attached to each segment. If you look carefully at the picture, you will see two legs attached to each part. Sometimes of them are together and sometimes of them are apart 



Every time we go to visit my mother, we sort through some of the things in her house. This time I found old papers containing this Easter Card I made in 3rd grade. The interesting thing about all of this sorting is just when we think we have found all of something, we find more. Just like I thought I had already gone through all of my things and then found more of them this time.


We decided to take the back way home and make a few stops along the way. The main destination was Blackwater Falls. This is where Ward and I spent our honeymoon, so to speak. A better description would be this is where we spent our wedding night and was the first stop on our 3-day drive to New Orleans where we were going to live. Neither of us remember much about that time other than how tired we were. So we wanted to visit the falls when we had time to relax and enjoy them.


We also saw rhododendron in the woods. Rhododendron is native to West Virginia and became the state flower in 1903.


This is the base of a rhododendron and it brought back memories of geology field camp. There were huge thickets of rhododendron, so large that you couldn't find a way around them, so you had to go through them. However, the branches were just big enough that you couldn't bend them but big enough you couldn't break them making the traverse quite difficult. Oh, and to top it all off, there were usually greenbrier vines with thorns laced through out. Fun, fun.


There's the first part of the trip. Tomorrow, I'll show you the rest. Until then...