Weekend Camping and C&O Heritage Center Visit

It's Monday. I am off work today, and I'm going to write two blog posts. My post-vacation blues were pretty severe last week. I decided I better make this work week a shorter one, so I took a vacation day today to catch up on things like laundry and running errands. And rest. And my blog. And I decided a short autumn camping trip was in order.

And the camping trip did indeed make my ordinary life look a little brighter. The fall colors are at their peak in the mountains. We stayed at the Morris Hill Campground near Lake Moomaw, about a 3 hour drive from Richmond. The campground was just about empty. There were two other families there. I can't believe there were so few people out enjoying the incredible weather over the weekend.

We didn't do anything too exciting on this trip. The idea was to relax. And it was very relaxing. We mostly sat around the campfire and talked to each other. And I drank a lot of beer. I made a really tasty campfire dinner (roasted cauliflower with shallots, grilled chicken thighs, and yellow saffron rice, all cooked to miraculous perfection). When I unfolded our air mattress, it was covered in mold, and so we slept on the hard, cold ground. But I even enjoyed that.

We stopped in Clifton Forge on the way there to visit the C&O Heritage Center. There was some sort of town-wide festival happening in Clifton Forge, which meant there were a lot of people at the museum, but a full staff of volunteers was there to tell us all about the trains and buildings and things. Boyfriend is the train nerd, but I really enjoyed this outing as well.

We got to go inside this old engine. It was pretty neat!

This is all the crazy stuff the engineer had to keep an eye on.

The dining car is lovely. Has a working kitchen and may be rented for events.

I loved the Chessie Cat china in the dining car.

Pretty comfortable, but very close together.

Freight car.

A little desk cubby place in the caboose, for the conductor I guess.

An older caboose.

A beautiful day to visit the C&O Heritage Center.

We were gonna get up early and go fishing at Lake Moomaw on Sunday morning, but we slept in instead (a little too long). On the way home, we stopped in Afton for a visit to the Blue Mountain Brewery. We tasted all the beers they had on tap ($8 for 9 shot glasses of craft beer) and had a very tasty snack. It was a fun visit, but due to the proximity to Charlottesville and UVA, there were a lot of white people with fancy shoes there, which I found distracting in an unwanted sort of way. Blue Mountain makes some great beer (I am especially fond of the seasonal Pumpkin and the Blue Reserve varieties, and they also make a great Virginia Pale Ale). I shall not tell you how much money was spent on the beer we left there with... they're seasonal brews! One of a kind! Artisanal! 

A growler of Blue Mountain's Blue Reserve, on my kitchen counter!

Well, it's after noon now and I better get out of my pajamas. I have to go to Petsmart for cat supplies. Butter Bean is something like 14 in cat years, and her teenage qualities are pretty extreme. I am hoping that buying a new scratching post will distract her from scratching up the couch. I'm such a cat slave.