Thursday - Day 5

We decided we would get up at 8 to leave the house by 9 for an excursion to Shenandoah National Park. When we woke up at 11, that kind of fell apart. Instead, we had breakfast and tried to figure out what we wanted to do with the day. We decided to go ahead and go to the park. We entered at Thornton Gap and drove down through the central district. Here are a few pictures from our day at the park. We'll post all of the pictures (these plus others) on Shutterfly overnight (the internet is extremely slow up here and the pictures take forever to upload).

This is the lake that we went paddle-boating on yesterday... as viewed from the top of the mountain.

These deer were just hanging out alongside the road. We stopped to take a couple pictures, as did another car. The deer stayed calm for a while, then gallopped off into the woods.

It was about 4:30 when we finished the central district and were ready to get dinner (having had breakfast at 11 and no lunch) - we drove back to Luray outside of the park and got to see a few small towns along the way. We went to dinner at "Artisan's Grill" in town. Dinner was fair - nothing special. From there, we were going to walk the Luray Greenway (we'll do that another day and include some pictures). It sounds like it's a well-manicured walking trail that goes through town. The brochure we looked at makes it look really nice. Anyway - rain clouds with occasional drops scared us off of an outdoor walk.

Instead, we drove back home (and got caught in a ferocious downpour). When we got to the house, I worked on starting a fire in our outdoor fireplace. We ended up sitting outside by the fire for several hours, talking about all kinds of things. Then we let the fire die down and we went to bed.



Beth made herself a s'more.