Sleeping, Reading, and Walking

There are the occasional times when the Internet needs to be abandoned and one focuses on the surrounding beauty of nature. Ironically, I felt this was needed on Kate's Mountain in Greenbrier State Forest just outside the lovely little town of Lewisburg, despite the visit to the gorgeous Boulder Rockies the previous week or living in the beautiful Asheville Smoky's. However, I have soft spot for some very livable cabins in Greenbrier as well as great food and a variety of excellent shoppes in Lewisburg. For people who know me, mountain cabins do not necessary ring an authentic note. Seaside spa is closer to my type. However, there are times when escapism is needed, and I have the urge to sit on closed porches such as this with a great mug of tea and several books :)

As I mentioned in a previous post, hiking is recent interest of mine, and I managed another successful week of it with 10 miles under my belt up and all over Kate's Mountain. While the first picture was achieved by driving two hours down dirt roads in the forest, the following photos are representational of the huge number of shrooms and beautiful scenes a Fall walk offers.

Wildlife and Shrooms

Now back to the grindstone, but in a much happier state with less interest in spending 14 hours a day in front a computer, especially with so many more waterfalls to explore near Asheville :)

The Prophet (book review)

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


View all my reviews

Beautiful Colorado

Oh, how I miss Colorado! Eric and I have discussed how the single winning difference between Asheville and Colorado is distance to so many other areas of the country that we love that does not require a minimum of an eight hour car trip! That's the one downside of the west. However, I visit Colorado regularly, checking back into my old haunts from when we lived there, and wondering how I didn't appreciate them more at that time. One of the family trips was driving a 10 mile dirt road up through the mountains in Rocky Mountain National Park. Once the traffic jam of photographers was fought (you would think that elk grazing on the grass there is comparable to seeing a real dinosaur, but I won't go overboard on criticism since I've been, ahem, known to randomly stop to stare at wild animals!), we puttered up the rather steep and absolutely stunning dirt road with many pit stops. One such pit stop is in the video above, where Elle enjoys climbing. In fact, I think she climbed anywhere she could get near a rock all week, which was not difficult.

Note: Out West photo album is fully updated and in the Travel Photos section on the left.