Saturday we loaded up the car and started for home the long way. A 2 hour drive took us to Shenandoah National Park, which is essentially a single road that winds through the "peaks" of the Shenandoah mountains. The park is 100 miles long or something like that, and we were only able to see the northern third, but it was very pretty. Though the mountains aren't particularly high, they still have a decent prominence over the surrounding area, so you can forget that you're barely over 3,000 feet up. We took in some vistas and went on a pair of short hikes, because the park includes part of the Appalachian Trail.
Pretty panoramic views
The AT is over 2,100 miles long and runs from Georgia to Maine, and if I ever have enough money to take weeks and months off of work, I'd love to go hike a lot of it. But for now, we settled on two hikes of roughly a mile a piece. Neither hike went anywhere particularly noteworthy, but they were pretty. Between the first two hikes, we saw a black bear and cub from our car. Then, on our second hike, we met this guy about 30 yards ahead of us on the trail:
A very average bear
Coincidentally, this is also the point where Shannon declared that it was time to turn around and go back. I reluctantly agreed. The bear just wandered briefly across the trail and continued on into the woods without ever giving any indication that he was interested in us at all.
Me on the AT (the white line on the tree is how the AT is marked)
We left Shenandoah (and it's very disappointing visitor's center and gift shop) to head for our last new state of the trip - West Virginia. We went to Harper's Ferry, which is on the point of WV that sticks the furthers East. It's historically significant as a great place to cross the Shenandoah before it joins the Potomac which made it strategically important in the civil war. It was also the site of John Brown's raid in 1859, which aimed to start a slave revolt and was quickly put down by Colonel Robert E. Lee. We hiked around a bit where the civil war cannons were placed, but didn't go into town where the restored buildings are. The hike turned out to be very hot and humid and (say it with me) we were getting very tired.
Before leaving town, we did head to the Appalachian Trail Headquarters, which is in Harper's Ferry. It's a little bit ironic because West Virginia only has 4 miles of the trail itself, but that's where it is. We looked around for a few minutes, enjoyed the air conditioning, I bought a hat and a key chain and we continued on to our hotel in the Pittsburgh area.
Day 7: Not the John Johnson Farm and Driving Home
A few years ago we went to Kirtland and made the trip to Hiram to see the John Johnson farm. As it's a half hour or so from all the other church history sites in the area, I don't think too many people visit there. As a result, we had a tour all to ourselves. The missionary couple there gave us a private tour and were thoughtful enough to have one do the talking while the other would hang back to keep an eye on our girls (who would have been about 5 and 3 at the time) to make sure they didn't get in too much trouble. This let us pay a little bit more attention to the tour. They also did a good job of fitting the tour to our interest level and time constraints.
Fast forward to the present, and we figured that since it was a Sunday and we weren't going to church, we could make the detour on the way home to stop by the John Johnson Farm and have it be our "church" for the day. It was something like 20 minutes of extra driving, and we planned to get there right about 11:30 when they opened. Surely no one would be there at 11:30 on a Sunday, right?
Wrong. When we got there, there was an entire youth conference there. Somewhere on the order of 100 kids and leaders. We walked up to the home and the missionary told us that we were welcome to join in the tour, or we could wait 40 minutes until the current group was through. We hung out in the garage area where they were giving general background about church history, doctrine and revelations that happened in Hiram, and it was clear that this wasn't the tour for us. And we could see that this was going to be a 40 minute long fireside-like doctrinal lesson with 50 strangers. None of those are bad things. It was not, however, what we needed: an empty, time-flexible tour with the ability to connect with our children, to keep them engaged. On that tour they would have struggled to see anything, understand much, and keep quiet enough to be curteous to others.
So, we bailed. After using the bathrooms there, of course. It was a little frustrating, and a little bit ironic.
Beyond that, the drive home was pretty uneventful. Some rain. Lots of driving. We got home around 5:30, which never happens when we go on trips, because we're usually completing a 2 day, 20 hour drive back from Utah. So instead of falling into bed and leaving everything to deal with the next day, we actually unpacked, started a load of laundry, put the suitcases away, had dinner (pancakes) and got to bed at a decent time. It was kind of amazing. (And good, because I got to come right back to 3 very long days at work.)
So, there you have it. We went to DC, walked everywhere and saw everything.
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