Paul recently was away for two weeks in Blacksburg, Virginia while all that previous excitement was going on. He was there for a course through his work. You would think having done long distance for two years before we were married this should be a piece of cake! After about a half a day I missed the ol' man. So after the first week I drove down there with his boss' wife to spend a night with our husbands. It was a great drive through the mountains of Virginia. When I say mountains they are really mountains! I am still amazed by the steep curvy roads here. We all went to a lovely dinner on a roof top patio, of a cajun place and the food was so good! I am not one to get excited about food, contrary to what it appears, but this was really good! I had a jerk chicken Po' Boy and oh my word it was delish!!!!!! Washed it down with a couple of Long Island Ice Teas and I was good to go!
The next moring I got up early Paul was still sleeping so I headed down to the pool to have a quick dip and wake up. So rare that I am near a pool. I was the only one in there! It was a bit eerie as the had piped in classical music which I was enjoying when I was in the hot tub. But when I got in the pool and started splashing around I sort of felt like I was a really bad syncronized swimmer in Disney's Fantasia. While we were there we also toured Viriginia Tech's Campus a bit, what a beautiful campus it is! All over town was sprinkled with these painted Hokies, which is the mascot for Virginia Tech and I think a turkey. Paul and I have had a discussion about this, if a Hokie was a species of bird or a dumb name for a turkey but after talking it over with others we have concluded it is a very angry looking, large breasted male turkey. See photo. LOL..
Elizabeth and I headed back to F'burg the next afternoon and my GPS has been having issues lately. Since we moved here, anyway. It needs to be updated but it will get you where you need to go, it just takes you a completely backwards way but you will get to the end result! So we set it to head home, and we see the highway but it takes us through this back country road of narrow, winding roads through farms and shacks and I look over to my right and I see yup we are driving down a mountain side! For obvious reasons I do not have photos of this as I am not one to drive and take photos. It was a gorgeous view though I must say.
Paul was coming home that following Friday, and it seemed like he was gone forever! They made it in about 6:30pm Friday night and Paul just walked in the door and went to change his clothes it was so hot and humid here. We were just catching up and all of the sudden Lola starts acting strange. We heard it raining a bit but she usually isn't scared of rain. I look outside and it was like our house was going through a carwash, rain was pouring out of the sky. Lola was giving me this desperate look and then I heard the wind howl. I looked at Paul and said maybe we should head to the basement. I turned to grab Lola and she was gone. Then we heard a POP, and I look out again to make sure nothing had fallen on a powerline. Outback our upstairs neighbor's patio umbrella snapped in half and went soaring three yards over, and all our plants has been blown over. Then all of the sudden it stopped. The wind calmed, the ligtning stopped and it was just a mist. Paul went and rescued the umbrella, Lola came out from hiding and poof our power went out. The whole thing lasted about 15 minutes but the destruction was unbelievable. Trees were down on our street, the flag that was outside our house was broken, leaves and branches all over the yard. So we thought we would go get some dinner and hopefully the power will be back on by the time we got home. No such luck. It was so stinkin hot in our house we opened all the windows, and they were saying power would not be on until 11pm. It went out at 6:50pm. It stayed off for 23 hours! We had no A/c nothing and we were so uncomfortable, we got up the next morning after only sleeping about 3 hours due to the heat and took a drive in the air conditioned car, but even the car due to the heat was not running like it normally would. It was really bizarre. Finally after sitting and sweltering for 18 hours we decided to head to the backyard and sit in the sprinkler to cool down.
At that point you don't care what the neighbors are saying, we had to do something! At the 20 hour mark we finally went to for a walk to see what was taking them so long. Everyone else in town had power even the people on the end of our block, but our side and part of the otherside and the houses down the road were all out still. Come to find out the storm destroyed a power pole and line and they had to replace the whole thing. Thankfully the little pub about a block from our house had power so we headed there and enjoyed their air conditioning drank some cold drinks and chatted with some of the others who were still without power. We had a plan that if the power was still out for another night we would just camp out in the backyard with the fly off the tent at least you would catch a slight breeze that way. Even the cat would just lay on the hardwood floor lifeless, trying to conserve her energy. We kept giving her ice from a bag in her water and wiping her down with one when she would let us. Us northern blooders don't fair well in this heat. After the pub we walked in and realized the power was back on! Woohoo!!!! It taught us we depend way to much on electricity. We did have some solar powered flashlights, radio and a battery operated fan that helped us, but made us rethink how we use things.After spending that much time in the heat, we felt we had been hazed into the southern lifestyle. The next day we decided after having a great night sleep finally, we should go out for a hike. We headed to
Lake Anna State Park about 45 minutes from us. Again it was hot and humid not quite as bad as the day before, or maybe we were just climatizing finally.
We were the only ones on the trail out there, and it was awesome. Mostly it was shaded which helped, and we followed the trail near Lake Anna so you would have a nice breeze every now and again. We came across an old smoke house on what was an old Pigeon Plantation, which is now over grown with weeds and you can tell not to many people walk back there. As we were standing in the meadow reading about it, we heard a noise and we look to see a young white tailed deer hopping through the forest. It was a great first hike and we are looking forward to doing some more, although we think we will wait until it cools down a bit.
(My Survivor Look)
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