Bring On The Wii

We wanted to travel later in the day yesterday, so we packed up and got ready to go at our leisure.  Fort Monroe is an amazing place and I recommend it as a great RV park, but it was time to move on.  We wanted to kill a little time before we made the 269 mile trip to our designated Wal Mart parking lot for the night, so we decided to try out the bowling alley there on Fort Monroe.

Now, although we had bowled extensively on the Wii in the comfort of our living room back home, neither of us had actually done the real thing in many years.  DeWayne informed me on the way to the alley that since I almost always out-bowled him on the Wii, he was going to kick my butt doing the real thing.  Okay, we’ll see….

The bowling alley was very nice, complete with snack bar and video games, although we didn’t see a single pinball machine.  The smell of hamburgers on the grill and french fries met us as we walked in the door and smelled wonderful. 

We got our shoes and picked out our balls, then the battle was on!  I say that with tongue in cheek, because the first ball either of us bowled was a gutter ball!  Actually, my second was too while DeWayne got three with his second ball as the scoreboard shows….

For those of you that don’t know, DeWayne’s first name is Ralph, so that explains the name on the scoreboard.  Oh, and I had to get a picture of what the scoreboard showed when we guttered the ball.


We saw a lot of those, by the way.  However, we both got lucky once in a while and actually bowled a……

Cute, huh?  Anyway, try as I might to get back the old form from my bowling days, I discovered that not only the wrist no longer had that old flexibility, but the shoulder kept hollering “Hey, stupid!  I just don’t DO THAT anymore”!  So it was like bowling with a whole different body than I used to bowl with.  Heck, I couldn’t even get the ball to go straight down the alley, so I spent the entire time trying to adjust where to stand and release the ball to compensate for my erratic form.  What a disaster!  Needless to say, DeWayne was true to his word and soundly kicked my butt in both games.



Here is evidence of our scores for the first game:

And the second game:

So DeWayne improved while I declined, but ya know what?  We had fun, it was cool in the bowling alley, we killed a couple of hours and we got a little exercise, so all was good.  Now, bring on the Wii, doggone it!

Back in our own shoes, we made our way to the parking lot where our “home” was hooked to the truck and ready to go.  It was already getting really hot and humid, so I was grateful to get going fast enough for the A/C to kick in and get cool. 

With Fort Monroe in our rear view mirrors, we were once again making our way down another new road with all new scenery.  I was immediately enthralled at the beautiful landscape around us and it just kept getting better all day.  I took lots of pictures, but around every bend I was grabbing the camera to get a shot of what impressed me at the moment, which was just about everything!












It was getting late, so we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for dinner just in time to catch the sunset.

This is the view we had from our table at the front window of the restaurant


DeWayne walked after supper in the Cracker Barrel and surrounding parking lots and I caught up on who was doing what on Facebook, then we drove on the Christiansburg, Virginia where we arrived around 10:30 after the heat had lessened considerably and we were able to open the windows to get a cool breeze for the night.  After showers, we were both ready to hit the sack, but I had a hard time going to sleep, so I got out of bed and worked on my facebook farms til the battery was just about dead on the laptop, went back to bed and finally was able to sleep around 2:00 this morning.

We were up this morning, fed and ready to get back on the road at 10:00 and only had 130 miles to go.  We hadn’t gotten back on the road again before I was grabbing the camera every five minutes again, all the while telling myself:  “Self, you know the battery is getting low on the camera, so stop taking pictures of everything you see!”, but “self” just kept ignoring me.

Ya know, I thought that Pennsylvania was the prettiest state that we had travelled through, but I gotta tell ya…..VIRGINIA IS ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!!!










We left the interstate at Bristol, Virginia for the last leg of our trip to the RV park.  We knew Bristol had a connection to nascar, but not being fans, that was about all we knew about it.  We wound through town til we saw this:

We made a right at this corner and not far down the road, this is what was in our windshield


I’ll bet this is a busy area on race day!  We only went a couple of miles before we spotted the RV park, and it was a welcome sight!


We pulled up close to the office and parked and while DeWayne went in to take care of business, I had to get a shot of this RV that I spotted as we came into the park:

These folks are probably workampers since they are parked close to the office and are obviously settled in for a while.  They have certainly made their spot a welcoming and pretty spot.

Back in motion, this is what we saw as we headed down the hill to our appropriate parking space:

Hey, I was impressed already!  We wound our way around and DeWayne got the RV backed into the slot.  After the slides were out, everything attached, the RV leveled and A/C cranked up, I opened the blinds and checked out our view.  Although we are backed up against a hill and there’s not much to see that direction, I opened the blinds in the bedroom.  This is our view from the bedroom window:


Not bad, huh?  I was hungry as a bear, so I ate part of my leftovers from Outback and, of course, got really sleepy, so I retired to the bedroom for a much needed hour and a half nap.  Ahhhhhhh.

I woke to the sound of thunder and it didn’t take long before we had a full fledged thunderstorm going on with lots of lightning and thunder, but it passed over fairly quickly.  I wanted to venture down toward the water, so DeWayne went with me.  There were a couple of guys down by the dock taking turns on a jet ski.  I snapped a few pictures of the RV park on our trek down to the water





We can rent one of these boats if we like.  Makes me miss our pontoon boat, but I’d rather rent one than make payments, pay insurance and try to store one year round again.




I had to get a shot of my FAVORITE SCENERY OF ALL as he watched the jet ski antics out on the water:

We made our way back up toward the RV, so I took this of our “home”:

We went across to an empty space and sat a while at the picnic table just taking in the beauty around us:

That fence above is part of the Dog Park.  All dogs have to be on a leash in the RV park, but they are allowed to run loose and get some exercise in their own little park.



I’d like to live in that house in the above picture.  It’s a beautiful place and I hope I can get a picture of it before we leave at a better angle.  Too many power lines in the way.

Well, that’s been our last couple of days, so I’m caught up once again.  I’m glad everybody likes the pictures.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I get to do this blog the lazy way and let the pictures tell the story.  We will be here tonight and tomorrow night, then get back on the road Saturday.  This place has a pool that I plan to take advantage of tomorrow as well as the laundry so I’ll be caught up again for a while. 

I know this has been another long one, but I took over a hundred pictures the last two days and there were just so many I could eliminate without posting.  We’re slowly but surely getting closer to home and we’re looking forward to the reunion.  Look out, family….here we come!

I can’t believe I’ve gotten this done by 10:00 at night.  So I’ll shut up and get it posted.  Don’t know if I’ll post tomorrow, but I’ll try.  In the meantime, everybody stay cool and HAPPY TRAILS!!!!