Ok, so I've been a little busy but I'm finally getting to Day 3 of my trip to West Virginia with the boys.
We woke up early on Saturday morning, packed up, checked out and headed toward our first stop for the day which was a nice little overlook of the New River. We were only here for a few minutes. Our time here would have been a lot less but Bereket had to go KaKa in the very nasty port-a-potty. Where is the gallon of hand sanitizer when you need it?
Anyway, we left there and headed to our next stop. In the town of Talcott, WV there is a grand statue dedicated to John Henry. I had made sure that the boys saw a video on John Henry before we visited the statue. Of course we also listened to the Johnny Cash song, "The Ballad of John Henry." By the way, if you don't know who John Henry is then I'll just let you google him.
We then continue our journey by visiting Pipestem State Park. This was a highlight for the boys. This state park has an aerial tram that takes you down the mountain to the Bluestone River. They loved the tram. It was very exciting. Once off the tram we went and explored the Bluestone National Scenic River. Joshua and Feromsa were having fun with "boat" races. The boats were large pieces of tree bark. Meanwhile, Bereket was "spearing" something in the river with a large stick he found. For all the time we had spent at rivers on this trip, this was the only one that one of the boys fell in. Joshua went down but fortunately it wasn't real deep so he just got a little wet.
After taking the tram back to the top of the mountain we left Pipestem State Park and headed home. On the way home we stopped at Cracker Barrel for lunch (this is a bit of a Raymer family tradition to stop here on the way home from a trip). We left there and traveled on. In the van the boys were watching Superman 4 and hardly noticed the tunnels that we went through this time.
Admittedly, we were all getting a little tired and were looking forward to being home but we had to make one more stop. We had to pay respects to Andy and Opie in Mt. Airy (aka Mayberry). I love this town. We stopped to see the statue and to look at the Andy Griffith memorabilia collection. Driving through the historic downtown area of Mt. Airy Joshua asked why they kept the place looking so old. I simply replied, just because they wanted to. He then asked, "So, this is how things looked back in the 1990's?"
We finally left Mt. Airy and made our way home. It was a great little trip. We saw a lot of beautiful places, historic places, and even a couple of statues. The boys watched 3 Superman movies and one classic Don Knott's movie. I love these trips where I get to see and experience new places but what really makes them great is sharing these trips with people that I love.
