Today started way too early and didn't go as planned at all. I don't think Tim even slept 2 hours. Poor man. Remember how I said you need a plan A, B and C when traveling standby? Well, I discovered this morning that you need even more plans sometimes. Sometime during the night our flight to DC that looked really good ended up with 15 more passengers on it. Don't ask me where they came from. I'll probably never know. We got up at 3:45 am anyway and hoped we were wrong. We were in the lobby waiting for the shuttle 30 minutes later and at the airport by 4:30ish. We were right. We didn't get on that flight. We noticed that the standby lists for all the flights were incredibly long. Must be the kids are out of school or lots of people commute for work. Who knows. We were desperately looking for any way out of this town. Everything looked hopeless when we noticed a flight delayed for several hours going to Houston. That is hugely out of our way but people were changing to other flights so they could make their connections and that allowed us to slip in! It's strange how excited we were to go the wrong direction, but that's how we felt. Luckily there were a couple of seats to Charleston, West Virginia leaving 90 minutes later from Houston. We were so happy to get to west Virginia even though it is 7 hours later than we had planned.
I loved seeing West Virginia from the window of the plane. Absolutely stunning. Trees and rolling hills everywhere. Probably the greenest I've ever seen. It is raining again. We have picked rainy days to be a lot of places. It is colder than usual here they are saying, too.
On the plane I was tapped on the shoulder by this cute girl. She is Evelyn and is from Puebla, Mexico. She was dying to try out her broken English and decided I looked friendly enough. It was a very funny hour and a half as she kept asking me questions and I would try to answer in words she could understand. A lot of smiling and head nodding. She is coming to West Virginia for a month to study at the university of charleston. She was with a group of 4 teachers and 11 students. None of them spoke very good English. She was so loving and adorable and I'm so glad she approached me. I ended up trying to converse with many in the group. She asked to have this picture taken with me and thanked me profusely for being such a nice person. So glad I could meet her.
This airport is so small that you deplane right on the runway. It was funny watching people try to figure out how to get in the terminal as there wasn't anything marking the path. The first people wandered around a bit and then ended up knocking on a door to get let in to the terminal. Fun to watch as we were waiting for our bags.
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I try so hard to find these signs in each state. I love them.
The rocky sides of the road are so beautiful.
Our cute rental car. It is pretty new.
Lots of beautiful flowers around this town.
Charleston is a very religious town. We found a baptist temple, a catholic school and church and huge church buildings for the united Methodist, episcapallian, and Lutheran churches. Beautiful buildings.
When we hit a new town I always ask the airport, hotel and rental car employees where is good to eat and what we should try and see. I have to say, they have never led us wrong. We ate at the Bluegrass Cafe and it was delicious. We are eating our way through all of these states. I say enjoy it while we are here and then hit the diet hard when we get home. Tim pretty much agrees. This is a picture of the cheese fondue. We wanted to lick the bowl.
This is a terrible picture, but a funny memory. I have to dye my roots on my hair every 2-3 weeks. Normally I try to time it so I'm ok on vacation, but this time I was more worried about not having gray roots for preschool graduation. I knew that the gray would make me crazy while we were traveling and so I thought I'd pack the stuff and then if I found the time I'd just do it in the hotel. Well, late last night I decided was a good time. I am happy to say it worked awesomely and I am now gray free!
I want to say a few words about how fun it is to live out of a carry on bag for 16 days. I'm so tired of the clothes I packed that I might burn them when I get home. I packed some of my favorite clothes and now I hate them:-) I've felt this way after every long trip I've taken, so I know it will be ok. It feels like my suitcase is shrinking each day as I load it up to move on to my next destination even though I haven't bought anything new. Don't ask me how that is, it just is.
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