Homeward Bound...New River Gorge Bridge...

Our final tourist destination was in West Virginia. This was Claude's pick of places to see on this trip. There is an area in the lower middle portion of West Virginia called the New River Gorge. Rivers feed into rivers and run into other rivers and this portion is a gorge in the land carved out by the New River which is a descendant of the Teays River. There is a 70,000 acre National Park covering this area today.

Now, if you have ever taken a drive through West Virginia, you know that it is all tree covered mountain after tree covered mountain. Try driving Hwy 50 across the upper portion. Years ago, my car almost overheated driving Hwy 50. The kids and I stopped at a wonderful back country kind of store for a meal and shopping to let the car cool down. They now have several Interstates running though the state that facilitate a faster means of travel. But for years this particular gorge was a real 'slow down the process' part of the state. The only way to get across at this point was a windy road that was mostly one lane and it took you at least 40 minutes at best to get from the top to the bottom of the gorge on one side, cross a little bridge, and drive from the bottom to the top of the other side. This was done with horse and wagon and was extremely laboreous and a mite dangerous.

Claude and I started at the lower end of the park just of I-64. We visited the Sandstone Visitor's Center. Got maps of the park and a couple of maps of further sites in the park we wanted to see. Then we drove to Sandstone Falls.

Then we went a little further north in the park to Grandview and visited 3 overlook sites there: Main Overlook, North Overlook and Turkey Spur Overlook. The Main and North Overlooks are both views of the same site.

The Turkey Spur Overlook is the most grueling to get to. You hike up 150 narrow, steep wooden steps to get to the top of an enormous rock.

On one side you view the same site seen at the Main and North Overlooks. One the other side of this huge rock you see a small old settlement with a train station in it. We also saw the cutest deer that just watched us. It was a doe and she would peek under the railing to be sure where we were.

Our final destination was the Canyon Rim Visitor's Center. We walked to the overlook at the top of the canyon and also the one in the visitor's center.

Then we drove the old road from the top of the canyon to the bottom, across a little old bridge, then back up the other side to the top and back over the New River Bridge. In the older days this road was dirt and one lane. Today they have paved it but it is still one way most of the time. We made a donation at the visitor's center and got a CD that narrates your drive along this road. You pause when you get to the pull-offs and restart when you restart your drive.

At the bottom of the gorge, we hiked across a lot of huge rocks to get to the waters edge.

I took pictures of the rafters going down the river at the little rapids and the old bridge we had cross to get over the river.

The New River Gorge Bridge is taller than the Washington Monument with 2 Statues of Liberty staked on top. It is the 2nd highest bridge in the United States. It is the longest steel arch in the world. There is a lot of hiking, rock climbing and rafting done in this park. It is just beautiful and a delightful place to visit.

Homeward Bound...Foamhenge...

That's right...FOAMHENGE...not STONEHENGE...but very, very similar.

In my searching for uncharted territory for Claude and I, I came across a bit on the Internet about Foamhenge. There is an artist named Mark Cline. He loves to do art that is little bit out there. (After seeing this piece of work, I'm in'cline'd to view others of his!) Mark was visiting a Styrofoam factory and noticed these monolithic pieces of Styrofoam. The light came on, an idea was born, and he set to work making it happen. He found a piece of ground near Natural Bridge, Virginia. This is just south of Lexington, Virginia on Hwy. 11. Now folks, when Claude and I were riding the trusty Honda Goldwing all over the country, we spent a lot of time on Hwy 11. It runs parallel for the most part along I-81 which is a major north/south corridor in western Virginia. When riding a motorcycle you are wanting to enjoy the ride and not fight traffic so these old federal highways are a great way to ride and still make fairly good time. Before Interstates, the federal highways were the main, fastest means of getting for point A to point B. But, again, I digress... This hill near Natural Bridge was a perfect location for Mark Cline to recreate Stonehenge (found in England) out of these monolithic blocks of Styrofoam. He worked closely with the people at Stonehenge to get an exact replica on this hill. You simply drive to the location, pull in and find a spot to park at the bottom of the hill (there is NO parking lot). Then you hike up the hill and view at your leisure. There is no fee. There is no tour guide. It is artwork for fun and enjoyment. There are some very clever signs about defacing property.

Mark has also added some quirks of his own. Merlin the magician is there on a slab of stone with the suggestion that maybe he is the one that moved the real Stonehenge stone to their location. The face of Merlin is actually modeled after a friend of Mark's that has passed away and wanted to be remembered in some of Mark's art.

I was able to get my good-hearted hubby to re-enact Samson pushing on the pillars so that they fell and the building crumbled.

This was a quick, quirky, and totally fun stop for us both. We would recommend it. If you have a child attending Southern Virginia University, it is very close.

Homeward Bound...The Walton's...

We picked two places on the way home to visit which we had never seen before in our travels in Virginia. Both I found by searching tourist stuff in Virginia. The 1st was Walton's Mountain.

Several years ago while in North Carolina we saw Mayberry RFD and really enjoyed it. So we felt a visit to another old favorite television show would be a good idea.

In a little town (I mean really little) called Schulyer, Virginia is an old school that has been converted into a museum. Schulyer, Virginia is the hometown of Earl Hamner. He is a writer. The character on the Walton's, John-Boy, is patterned after him. He has written many things just about everyone would know. He wrote the story 'Spencer's Mountain' which was made into a movie staring Henry Fonda. Then he wrote another story that was made into a TV movie called "The Homecoming". This was the movie that precipitated the creation of the TV show "The Walton's". He also wrote "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and "Charlotte's Web". He wrote several of the "Twilight Zone" shows. His family is the basis for the Walton family on the TV show. He used his siblings to pattern the kids in the show. His family home was the basis for the design of the Walton's home on the TV show. A lot of Earl Hamner and his life is in the Walton's television series. This is the story of a family of 8 kids, a mother & father, and a grandmother & grandfather that all live together on Walton's Mountain. They have a sawmill that helps finance them in the depression era. John-Boy is the oldest of the kids and was played by Richard Thomas. His hearts desire was to be a writer and the beginning to the show had him sitting at his bedroom window writing. There is a general store owned by Ike Godsey who eventually marries Cora Beth (a VERY strong woman). There are also 2 sisters that make "the recipe" in their home. They actually had a still and used their father's recipe to make their beverage. I purchased a quarter jar with a label on it for the top of my shelf in my kitchen. It was an excellent show with a lot of good moral training in it.

The town has taken the old school and converted it into a museum. They have tables set up in the gymnasium/stage. You pay a fee to enter. The walls of the gym are lined with boards displaying lots of pictures of the cast and of Earl Hamner and fellow Schuyler residents. In the Kindergarten room you see a video narrated by Earl Hamner about himself and the making of 'The Walton's". Then you can tour the classrooms at your leisure. Each has been decorated as a scene in the TV show.

The first room we saw was actually the script room. An actual script was open in a glass topped podium. Other scripts are stored in the bookshelves that line the room.

Then we saw the living room. A lot of the series was set in this room.

Then we saw the kitchen. Probably the most photographed of all the rooms in the home. In this room they also had a movie camera and platform that were used in the making of the show. The platform has the word 'crab' in its name. It literally rolled side-to-side and back and forth like a crab would walk. On it was mounted a movie camera used to film the show. Each of these pieces of movie making equipment also were used in the making of some famous movies like Close Encounters.

Then we saw Ike Godsey's store. He was a good friend to the Walton family. He really ran everything through this store. The post office was here. The only phone in town was here. It was the hub of the community. I purchased my Christmas ornament here. It is a patchwork heart with the words "Walton's Mountain" cross-stitched on the front. It was made by local ladies for the store. I also got Claude some homemade peach salsa.

We saw John-Boy's bedroom. Claude pointed out to me that the window air conditioning unit was not a part of the TV show.

We saw a replica of the 'recipe room'. The still in this room is a real still.

It was fun to visit this place. It is a beautiful drive to get to it. It is south of Charlottesville, Virginia and very rural. By the way...there was not really a mountain named Walton's Mountain. That is fictional in the show. The Hamner Family did have a relative that owned land that included a mountain and Earl got the idea from that but there isn't really a mountain there named Walton's Mountain.

DC Bound...Franciscan Monastery

In 2005 we received our March/April edition of AARP Magazine. There was an article in there of interesting places to visit. I saved page 75. After this trip we have seen both items on the page. The first item was "The Holy Land in Washington, DC". The second item was "The Netherlands in Michigan". This page out of a magazine was saved and it fell out as I was gathering my Hawaii travel books for our upcoming December-40th anniversary cruise. I was happy to find it again and called the phone number to be sure it was still a valid tourist destination. The very sweet lady on the other end assured me it was open and loved visitors and the roses on the property were in their second blooming and just beautiful.

The 2nd item in Michigan is about Holland, Michigan and their annual Tulip Festival. We have been to this wonderful event twice. We highly recommend it to anyone.

The 1st item is about the Franciscan Monastery located at Catholic University in Washington, DC. I have to say we lived there 20 years and I never heard of this place until after we retired and moved to Kentucky. This monastery received permission from the Vatican to recreate under the church located on their property and on the grounds surrounding their property sacred sites from the Holy Land. So we put it on our agenda.

We arrived a little before their next scheduled tour an waited in a large room off the chapel that had display cabinets full of artifacts and things of interest. I'll share two of my favorites. I tend to collect some pictures that can be used as I teach lessons and things. The first is a crown of thorns made out of thorns from the Holy Land. The 2nd is a replica of Antonia Fortress and some clay lamps.

Antonia Fortress fascinates me. It was built on the north wall of the temple mount right against the north wall around the temple area. It was built high enough on its 4 towers that the Roman guards could see into the temple area. This was important to keep down any problems during the holy days like Feast of the Tabernacles and Passover, etc. When we visited Israel we walked the floors of what would have been Antonia Fortress and saw where the Roman guards had carved into the stone floor their games they would have played. Our tour guide wore a white uniform with red belt and patches sewn on it. This is because he is a volunteer, not a monk or church official. They dedicate themselves to preserving and assisting this Franciscan order with the church and grounds. He had a slight speech impediment and this made it a little difficult for me to understand all he was trying to tell us. That, and I'm sure I'm starting to lose hearing. But he was a very nice man and you could sense the reverence he had for the Catholic faith and his opportunity to serve as a tour guide in this place. He took us into the main part of the church. Many Catholic cathedrals and churchs are set up in the shape of a cross. In the center is the main altar. In several of these buildings I have been able to tour, I have noted a wooden arch that reaches way toward the ceiling and the main altar is under this arch. Then at the end of each of the 4 parts of the cross pattern is an altar dedicated to someone. In this church they had beautiful altars covered with beautiful clothes with candles placed on top of the clothes. Above each altar there would be an elegant wood carving as long as the altar depicting the person that this altar was dedicated to. In several parts of this particular church there were also lovely stained glass windows over these altars.

One of the decorative elements I really liked as a star with a cross engraved in it. This cross reminded me of the Jerusalem cross that you find in Israel. It is a large cross with 4 little crosses in each of the four sections left by the larger cross.

Our tour guide would show us all of these things but underground in 4 corners of this church was where they have re-created places you may visit in the Holy Land.

The first of these we would visit was the portion devoted to the Tomb of Christ. Claude and I saw this in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. When in Israel we hiked very quickly down the Via Dolarosa from Antonia Fortress to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This would have been the route it is believed Jesus would have taken as he carried the cross (It is believed and was practiced that a person would only carry the cross beam that the arms would have been attached to and this is probably what Jesus would have carried, not the entire cross.) The depiction of this portion of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is really very well done and looks a great deal like the one in Israel. They have a long rectangular stone with 1 post on each of the 4 corners of the stone. This was the cleansing stone and would have been where they laid the body of Jesus to clean it before placing it in the sepulchre. Behind this stone was a VERY ornament little chapel built over the tomb of Jesus. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre this would have been around a corner but it too had this elaborate little chapel over the site. A sepulchre in Jesus time was actually a multi-room affair. This one had an little room as you enter where the mourners and family would have been. Then you went into the next room where a shelf was carved out to lay the body on. If it was a larger sepulchre it may have had more than one shelf so that other family members could also have been buried in this place. These sepulchres were carved out of the stone on which all of Israel lies. The pictures I chose to post on this blog are the following: 1) Our guide standing by the cleansing stone behind which is the chapel built over the tomb of Christ. You see a door and behind that door is the little room for the mourners and family. This particular room had a stone altar and I can't remember what the guide said it was for. Then there was another very elaborate gold guilded door taking you into the actual room for burial. 2) This is the slab in the 2nd room on which the body of Christ would have been laid.

Another place they have re-created is the Church of the Annunciation. This is located in Nazareth. It is where it is believed the angel told Mary (announced) that she was to be the mother of the Son of God.

Then we entered the catacombs. Claude and I have never been to the catacombs. There was so much to see in this portion. We walked down a representation of what we usually think of as the catacombs. The catacombs were a place where the Christians could hide from persecution, it was a place they could bury their dead, and it was all underground.

One of the things I learned was there were different types of burial niches in the catacombs. If you were a saint or martyr you were given a higher grade of niche. The light for this area was really clever. They had hanging lamps, literally! They had lamps shaped like the clay ones pictured earlier but made out of metal and hanging from the ceiling on a chain. They had light bulbs in them but they had the appearance of being clay lamps fueled with oil. Very clever I thought!

One of the rooms in the catacombs had some great artwork in it. There were wall murals made of mosaic tiles. Each told a different part of the belief of death and resurrection and the assignment of souls after death. I'm posting a picture of the mosiac mural of Lazarus being raised from the dead. There was an altar in this room and it had a wood carving on the front face of the 2nd coming and the horror some people would face at that day. Lots of red color in it. The 2nd picture is of this very dark altar.

Also found in this catacomb area were niches with a stone replica of the remains of a martyr, the actual mummy of a child, 2 paintings of Christians being persecuted in prison, a room with painting of stories from the Bible and at each end a glass case with a statue depicting a martyr and their pose tells their story.

Then we went to the Church of the Nativity. This can be found in Bethlehem at the Church of the Nativity. Each Christmas and Easter they hold HUGE programs on the plaza outside of this Church and they fill the Church with people. Often you see this square in the broadcast of these programs. They have the believed site of the birth of Christ in the basement of the church built over the site. They were very accurate in their replicating this site. Although I feel that the one in Bethlehem had a lot more gold and scarlet cloth and lamps hanging. This room has two portions to focus on. The first is a semi-circular area with a huge mosaic picture over it and a gold multi-pointed star imbedded in the floor. This is where the actual birth is believed to have taken place. The other is a little lower than the rest of this space and is where a stone manger is located. This is where Mary would have laid the baby Jesus. Stone is plentiful in Israel and most mangers to feed the animals would have been made of a carved out piece of stone. Hence, Jesus manger was probably really stone and not the wooden affairs we see at Christmas time.

This concluded our indoor tour with the tour guide. There was one other portion but it was under renovation. In fact, that wall of the sanctuary was draped in plastic from vaulted ceiling to floor. This would have been Golgotha. Claude and went outdoors to tour the magnificent grounds.

Around the out side front and sides of this complex are cloisters. It is a covered pathway with archways on either side. There were beautiful symbols between the arches on the outside of the cloisters. Inside at various intervals were mosaic pictures called 'rosary porticos'. Since we had no guide at this point I made the assumption that these are parts of what you may say if you were reciting the rosary. That could be entirely wrong but the mosaics depicted the life of Christ. Hence my assumption. Nonetheless, they were beautiful mosaics and I took a picture of all but the first 3 (because we didn't walk that far down to begin our walk of the cloisters). I'm posting a picture of what it looked like to walk through the inside of the cloisters and one of the mosaics depicting Christ being presented at the temple as an infant.

On the outside of this cloistered area and down a hill were some absolutely beautiful, quiet, peaceful gardens. In these gardens were the Grotto of Gethsemane, a replica of a Jewish tomb, the Tomb of Mary, a monument to St. Anne, the Lourdes Grotto replica, the Ascension Chapel, and the 14 Stages of the Cross. I'm posting the Lourdes Grotto (the woman in the center of the flowers is having a vision of Mary, the mother of Jesus, on the rock face) and the 1st Station of the Cross.

As you exit these exquisite gardens, there is a butterfly garden. It is by the cloisters and you can see the church we just toured behind the cloisters.

Within the cloister and around the front and sides of the church are beautiful flower beds, statues of St. Christofer and St. Francis, a statue of Friar-Priest Godfrey Schilling, and the Portiuncula (the church that St. Francis first began his work).

This was a wonderful experience. I came away appreciating the people, their love and dedication to their religious belief, and their kindness to those who visit this Franciscan Monastery. I didn't see a single Franciscan monk. But I did truly enjoy this stop on our trip.

DC Bound...GW Parkway...

One of the prettiest drives you'll take in the DC area is along the George Washington Parkway. This is actually a part of the National Park system. This particular parkway goes from the Beltway (I-475) in Virginia right after you cross over the Potomac River from Maryland to National Airport. It is gorgeous any season of the year from dogwood trees in blossom in the spring, dense foliage in the summer, fall leaves in the autumn and covered in snow in the winter. The Potomac River follows along one side of the George Washington Parkway (called GW Parkway by the locals). There are pulloffs to view the river along this outside lane. A neat walk is to get off the Parkway at Roosevelt Island and just enjoy the stroll. In the middle of the island (and only seen if you walk to it) is a wonderful marble monument to Roosevelt. You go under and past many of the bridges from DC into Virginia. I'm posting a picture of the Key Bridge. When Nissa and kidlings lived at Ft. Myer, we took this little turn off going to opposite direction of the picture to get to Ft. Myer. We used it a lot. Now they have that turn off constructed so the only way you can go after taking the turnoff is to cross the Key Bridge into Georgetown. You will see George Washington University, the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Jefferson Memorial with the Tidal Basin in front on the DC side across the Potomac River as you drive along the GW Parkway. On the Virginia side of the Parkway you will pass the CIA exit (I once accidentally took this exit when returning home from National Airport at night. It has HUGE gates posted with booths with people in them watching you and at night LOTS & LOTS of really big and very bright lights.), the Custis-Lee Mansion at the top of the hill in Arlington Cemetary and you'll see the Iwo Jima Memorial. Also on this side of the Parkway you'll pass the Pentagon. There is also Lady Bird's Garden and lots of monuments and fun things to see along the way. You end at National Airport. Just stay close to the Potomac River and you'll be just fine. If you wander into other lanes, leave a trail of crumbs so someone can find you later. The pictures are in order from I-495 toward National Airport. They are:

• George Washington University
• Lincoln Memorial at foot of Memorial Bridge with Washington Monument in background
• Key Bridge
• Washington Monument across Potomac River

Why this description of the George Washington Parkway you ask?? Claude and I took it to get from the George Washington Masonic Memorial to the Italian Store. This time I tried again to take pictures as we drove. I managed to get these few pictures to share with you. My description is from I-495 to National Airport but we drove it the opposite direction to get to Spout Run and the Italian Store.