Good Friday Morning!
Time is funny. Rolling on the backroads with Carmen, we started thinking about how it seems “just like yesterday” that we were first taking the old 4x4 out to chase fall leaves and scenery and adventure, but it was now at least 5 years. 5 years is a long time, and we can weave a tapestry of “remember that one day” across a great part of this beautiful country - but it always feels surprising to visit somewhere and realize that it’s been a couple of years since you’ve been there.
This is becoming an annual tradition for us - we take a tour of the state, ticking between low country and high country - visiting places that we’ve noticed in the years past as either being nice, or “could really be nice” if we catch it at the right time. So we have lots of memories of being in the moment, rolling, some small-town radio station on in the background, trying to figure out how to connect this one-lane road to the next one. And virtually all of those memories are good, even when we were getting our butt kicked by bad weather, or drive up into the mountains to find the leaves going from green-to-brown, or hit someplace and realize that we are a week late. Why? Because we remember the good parts, or the laughing at our bad luck, or the eternal optimism that “we’ll get it next year.”
Hopefully, this day - where we caught the sunrise on a mountaintop looking down at the clouds, then came here for early morning sun and breakfast, before a full day of playing in the Indian Summer part of the fall, will slot right in there. A Hazy, Pleasant, Memory that we keep for a long time to come.
A Hazy, Pleasant, Memory - West Virginia