I know I said I would post yesterday, but the day just got away from me. That’s allowed on vacation, right?
Anyways, I thought I’d provide a recap on Days 1 and 2 of our family vacation to Damascus, VA….aka “The Happiest Town on the Trail”.
My parents arrived in Cincinnati mid-day on Saturday to pick Eric, myself, and the dogs up. They had rented a mini-van so we could fit 6 bodies, all of our stuff, and dog crates…plus strap our bikes to the back of the van on the bike rack. The van worked out perfectly, although I’m sure the dogs wished they had an actual seat in the van.
They survived.
After we arrived in Damascus, we checked out our rental home, which was called “Between the Trails”.
The reason the house has the name is that it is smack dab between the Virginia Creeper Trail (mountain biking trail) and the Appalachian Trail (hiking trail). Both trails are 500 feet on either side of the home. Now, if the VC Trail was paved, like we thought it was, this would be super exciting…but as I said in my last post, we discovered it wasn’t when we got here, so road riding it is!
Our house has an awesome back deck as well!
Anyways, after getting situated in our home for the week, we headed out for dinner at a small restaurant. Then we headed home for some puzzle action and some sleep. We were all tuckered out from a long car ride!
Sunday morning Eric and I woke up early because my training plan called for a swim, bike, and run. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to get any swimming in this week. The pool doesn’t open until noon and there’s no dedicated lap lanes. I think I’m going to try to check the pool out this afternoon because my training plan today just calls for a swim, and I hate not getting any swimming in. I’d settle for just a few laps, even! But back to Sunday…Eric and I headed out in to the unknown for some road riding. My plan called for 2 hours, but with the hills around here I knew it wouldn’t last that long. We ended up riding for an hour…15 miles. We had some great scenery on the ride!
After the ride I did a 30 minute recovery run. My mom joined me while Eric followed on the bike. We just ran around the small town of Damascus (which involved passing each store about 3 times to squeeze 30 minutes out of the town).
After the run, it was time to get ready for our first hike of the week! We all got dressed in our hiking finest, and got Keifer packed up as well.
He’s ready to go!
We stopped by a hiking store to see if we could arrange a shuttle to pick us up at various places throughout the week, and after we got that squared away, we hit the trail.
Excuse my appearance…this is after a bike and run with no shower…what’s the need when I’m just going to get dirty again while hiking?!?
Yesterday’s hike was supposed to be a 5.6 mile hike going north on the AT, to a point with road access, where we were to be picked up by a shuttle and taken back to Damascus. The hike was great…minus the fact that at mile 3.7 we came across this sign…
With this written on the side of one of the posts…
I had read about this sign in my AT hiking book, so I knew it wasn’t a joke. Now for everyone that is following along and knows a bit about U.S. geography….Tennessee is south of Virginia. We were supposed to be heading north on the AT. If there were going to be any state line crossings, it wasn’t supposed to be one that put us in Tennessee!
Yes, we went the wrong way on the trail. Luckily I had grabbed the phone number of the shuttle place and my cell phone got reception since we were on top of a mountain, so we called them up and got laughed at…but told them not to worry about coming to get us! We then turned around and ended up getting a good 7.4 mile hike in for our first day! Keifer did such a great job on the hike. He seemed to really enjoy it and I think he’ll be heading out on all of our hikes this week.
After we got off the trail, we decided to head to the local winery for a tasting and a glass of wine. It was a gorgeous winery (no pictures, sorry)! The tasting room was in a building that was surrounded by tons of trees and a river ran nearby. We sat out on the porch for our glass of wine.
After the winery we headed back to the house to make some dinner and relax on the porch. A guy staying in the Hiker’s Inn nearby was out back and he had a boxer, so they came over for a little “dog park” action. He was actually finishing up the thru-hike that he started last summer, so we picked his brain about that for a while. Very interesting stuff. And good to know that his boxer does well on the trail as well!
After dinner we played a little Taboo and then hit the sack.
The schedule for today….relax this morning due to not being able to swim, and then hit the trails again. We’re thinking about doing the hike we were supposed to do yesterday (but going the right way this time) and then going to some of the shops in town to look around. There’s not much here, but there are a couple hiking stores that I’d like to see.
So far, so good! A nice, relaxing vacation :).
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