i had this big one pound bag of loose lapsang souchong that made me look forward to getting up in the morning, but somehow i managed to scrape out every last leaf out of the mottom of the bag before i ordered more. this morning i’m drinking mint tea which is fine but i NEED MY LAPSANG SOUCHONG.
hopefully it’ll be here in a day or two.
meanwhile, kevin’s virginia adventures…well, as i mentioned last night, as he was driving amongst the semis, in the pouring, he amused himself by squashing a mosquito on the windshield, taking a picture of it, and sending it to me.
here’s the photo, which you’ve probably been waiting for all night.
it’s funny, because in the picture you can’t tell it’s a mosquito squashed against the glass so much. the glass is pretty much invisible.
they spent the night at a Microtel Inn in the little town of waynesburg, PA. i had told kevin to call me when they got near a town they wanted to stay, and he called me a couple of hours before they wanted to stop and i found a town and then the hotel on trip advisor. the microtel was rated #1 out of five hotels there in waynesburg. i told kevin to send me photos, so garrick took some shots of kevin in his room.
i like this one especially, and told kevin that he can get a job as the official Microtel model. garrick, of course, will be their official photographer.
kevin took this picture of the bathroom, and the thing is, it looks exactly like the photo on their website, including the shower curtain draped back like that! hotels don’t look idential to their pictures so much.
this picture should be called “still life with glucose tabs.” that’s the cylindrical upright bottle there by the keys. kevin has to take them whenever his blood sugar drops too much and he’s not near food. he always carries them when we’re out walking.
i decided to google waynesburg, and it doesn’t look like such a bad little town. one thing that caught my attention was the Sheep & Fiber Festival, “‘Celebrating the heritage of lamb, wool and fibers in Greene County.’ One of the most popular activities is the “Sheep to Shawl” demonstration in which several teams are in a timed competition to create a finished piece of woolen apparel. Spectators see the process from the actual shearing of the sheep, cleaning and carding of the wool, then spinning and weaving into the finished shawl, all in one quick assembly-line operation.”
this is all well and good, but then there’s also lamb sampling, lamb handouts and cooking demonstrations. so, you can see the cute sheep being sheared, and you can also eat the baby sheep. it’s kind of like the aquarium we saw in st. andrews scotland – right next to it was a seafood restaurant. see the fish, eat the fish.
kevin, garrick and janice arrived at the candy hill campground outside winchester VA yesterday afternoon. here are the popups all set up nicely, garrick and janice on the right, kevin on the left. i wanted to know why they had that short squatty little shelter thing there in the foreground. kevin said they can lower it when they leave in case it rains. this is good, cause it rained.
those two pictures look pretty nice. one thing i want in a camping spot is lots of trees and as much privacy as possible. but in this picture, it looks like there’s not so much of either there at candy hill. this is why i think that camping in a state park or national forest can be better, in my limited camping experience. i had recommended staying at the campground that kevin and i had planned to stay in when we went to VA last fall, but it was sold out because they were having some kind of bluegrass festival there. i asked janice if she’d go to that other place sometime and take pictures to compare them. hopefully she will, although she gets lost pretty easily. i did print her out lots of maps before they left.
yesterday they were headed over to fort shenandoah where the shoot is held, and i happened to call them and kevin thought they were probably lost. i got out the computer and started asking him what landmarks were nearby, and what road they were on. i then remembered the maps i’d given janice, which had directions to the fort. they were in the other car. what about an atlas? also in the other car.
i never like to go anywhere without plenty of maps. luckily they had me, their personal GPS, to find out their location and turn them around and onto the right road.
when they got to fort shenandoah they walked around sutler’s row and I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY DIDN’T TAKE ANY PICTURES. i didn’t ask for any pictures of that particular thing but since kevin had taken pictures of their camp site on his own, i guess i figured they’d take photos. last year when i took kevin to the shoot, i couldn’t go on the grounds because NO DOGS WERE ALLOWED during the competition. a good rule, but i want to see what that sutler’s row looks like. it’s the place where all the merchants have stuff for sale, fyi.
surely they’ll get back there and take a picture, or at least janice will.
it seems that there would probably be some interesting things to look at there, but this is what kevin says he bought – plastic loading tubes, pink sight paint, a loading plug, and a hamburger.
and that’s the end of the civil war shooting competition report for now.
i still haven’t told you the awful and tragic gosling story! it’ll have to wait, cause i have many things to do today.
ok then,
mrs. thursday morning hughes.