Our Lucky Thanksgiving

We had much to be thankful for this last Thanksgiving. My older brother, "The Doctor(The Burbs reference)," was kind enough to drive nearly 6 hours from their current home in Connecticut to our place in little'ol Virginia. He brought his lovely family, including his wonderful wife, Lisa, and the two kids. They arrived safely Thursday evening just after I returned from cooking our turkey at our friends home. I know, your thinking, "why cook the bird at a friends place?" Well, the answer is simple. We were blessed with a total power outage when the turkey was about 30 minutes from being cooked. We called up our SUPER NICE friends, Jeff and Carrie, and asked if we could use their oven. They just happened to be frying their bird this year. Wow, we were saved. The power went on just as I was driving home from our friends.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing fun things with the kids and spending some quality time with my bro. The pics are here. We went downtown and visited the Museum of Natural History where we saw dinosaurs, the "Hope Diamond," and lots of sparkly rocks. We did not have enough time to see even half of the museum, so we agreed there will need to be another visit to D.C.

My hat goes off to my brother and sister-in-law for being such patient and truly loving parents. We hope to be able to visit them at their place in the near future.

Learning the Hard Way

ReBes was not feeling so hot on Veteran's Day, so I set out to do a 12 mile hike on my own. It was a great day and everything started off as it usually does; hurry to get all the stuff together, get out the door, race traffic, then finally figure out exactly where the trail head is located. This time I was going to see how fast I could do it. After all, it seemed like a fairly straight-forward and non-technical ascent to the top of the ridge, then back down again (foreshadowing intended). To shorten things up a bit, I missed my turn and ended up going the opposite direction of my intended route. After about 7 miles into it, I figured something was wrong, but I could not put my finger on it. Nearly 12 miles out, I knew I had no other choice than to turn around and backtrack to my last known point of origin on the map. I turned around, reluctantly, and retraced my steps back up to the top of the mountain where I was able to get cell reception and called ReBecca to let her know I would be home late. You can imagine the phone call - not only do I feel bad about not being with ReBes on my day off, but I wasn't even enjoying the time I was spending outdoors. Ranger Rick was in a pickle. I can say that I am super glad I "over pack" for most outdoor trips. This morning, when I had a chance to review the map, I realized that I should have turned on a barely visible (LOTS of leaves on the ground) section of the trail.

Lesson Learned: If ever a doubt, check it out.

Post River Trip Post

I did some serious chopping in Adobe Premiere Elements and ended up with the clip you see here of our September Gauley River rafting trip. It is a bit long at about 15 minutes or so. We had a blast and intend on returning next year for round 2. Luckily, we did not have one person go overboard from our boat. A big heart-felt "THANKS!" to our friends for having us along.