Okay then. I’m sure you’ve really missed all my witty insights over the past few weeks. But never fear, because I am back with a vengeance. As you may or may not know, the fam and I just spent the past week in McGaheysville, Virginia, at the Massanutten Resort (thanks for not looting our house while we were gone). We took a few pictures over the course of the week, and now it’s time to give a full report of the week’s adventuring.

I will pull a Braden and break this up into several different posts, and of course I will be backdating them.

So we started off last Friday (umm I mean “today”) from our lovely house. Planned departure time was 8:00 AM. Well, actually, our planned time was to tell ourselves 8:00 so that we’d actually leave at 8:30, so according to that, our actual departure time of 8:44 was close enough.

We stopped by the bank to get out some money. It’s a good thing that we did because we spent exactly $0 of that cash during the week… Though actually we do owe my aunt and uncle $7 of that, but more on that later.

And like that, we were off. The route we chose was one that we have driven many many times before. 71 South to 471 South to US 27 South to our good friend the Double A Highway. We drove past the Cold Spring KY Meijer on the way there (it’s at the intersection of 27 and the AA), but I did not stop for any more Nature Valley Granola bars and/or free Mueller pasta.

The AA was pretty uneventful. Copious amounts of insistence that I was going to do things my way on the Double A highway were had, etc. etc. I did pass by the Maysville Kroger and waved. Upon reaching the completion of the AA highway, I snapped a picture of one of my favorite signs of all time:

I mean I know McDonalds is cool and all, and Grayson probably isn’t that big but I’m not sure I’d call it a tourist attraction… I’m not sure why only McDonalds gets on the sign either – there’s also a Wendy’s and a Hardee’s and probably more. In any case, if you’re interested, here is where that picture is located. For some reason, Google insists on calling the “AA” KY 694 when actually it is KY 9.

We made our first stop of the day at the Super Quik which is about 1/4 mile to the right of this picture. We have stopped there many times on various trips to Virginia – it’s not a bad stopping point, depsite them apparently allowing smoking in the bathroom, which smelled.

We then started the long journey through West Virginia on I-64 East. One thing I find nice about this trip is that it is easily broken up into hourish-increments.

• Cincinnati to Maysville
• Maysville to I-64
• I-64 to Huntington (this is actually closer to 30 minutes)
• Huntington to Charleston
• Charleston to Beckley
• Beckley to the Virginia border
• VA border to I-81
• I-81 to Harrisonburg

That makes it seem to go by faster, at least to me, since you’re always no more than an hour or so from the next waypoing. West Virginia was as uneventful as it usually is, except for…

We hit 100,000 miles on the van. The 2nd picture is (approximately) where we were when we hit – that’s about 25 miles south of Charleston WV on the WV turnpike. I’ve been noticing that we were close for awhile, and when we started out I saw that we would hit it on the trip. I was very nervous I was going to forget about it and miss it, but luckily I didn’t. Or, more accurately, all of the times I forgot about it were before it mattered, and I remembered in time.

We made our second stop at ….TAMARACK! just south of Beckley WV. I’m not sure why we find Tamarack to be so funny. Is it the comparisons to the Monty Python Camelot song? or the fact that it seems so pointless? Or the fact that it is severely over-hyped? You can’t go 10 miles on the WV Turnpike without seeing a sign like this (pic stolen off the Internet)

We have some pictures of the “playground” that the kids played on there, but I’ll save those for a future post. One picture that we didn’t get was of an old woman. There was a life-sized doll of an old woman sleeping, that was just laid out on a rocking chair there. That, not so funny. But there was a “real” old woman sleeping (or just resting maybe) in the rocking chair right next to it, and that was quite funny. But by the time we had both independently noticed that and decided to take a picture (and scoped out a place where we could surreptitiously take a picture of her), she was gone. Alas….

A few hours later, we realized that we could probably make it all the way to Harrisonburg without stopping again, so we went for it. Nicely, despite no real coordination, my parents also arrived there within 5-10 minutes. That was nice because since the timeshare we were staying in is in their names, we couldn’t check in without them. We did some shopping at the Kroger there for the week ahead. 2 years ago we shopped at the Wal-mart there, but this time I wanted to go to Kroger since I still have a bunch of gift cards from the Kikkoman deal from a few weeks ago. We had brought a few things from the General Store, but annoyingly we forgot taco seasoning (we have about 50 packets of them at home) and pepperoni (ditto). Paying for both of these things irked me to no end.

And then…. we were there!

More to follow!