Wild and Wonderful

Yes, West Virginia is wild and wonderful. We arrived in Canaan Valley on Wednesday. The campground here is quite and peaceful. The views are outstanding. Having visited here every winter for 15 years, summer here is very different. Daytime temperatures hover around 68° and nighttime lows are around 55°. (That being said, last night got down to 49°!) It’s hard to believe this is August. Within the first 24 hours here, I committed myself to make reservations for next year. There are so many things to do here that we will not do them all this week. There aren’t too many letterboxes here, but I don’t think we will get to all of them either, since most are on hikes.

Our first full day here, Thursday, we did go and find two boxes in Thomas. Both boxes memorialize the windmills that dot the mountain ridge here. One box was a social studies project for a middle school student. The other was a beautiful stamp. I was glad I had all my colors with me to stamp it properly in my logbook. I’m now up to 88 finds. (Ignore my AQ count; most boxes around here are LbNA listed only.)

Wildlife is abundant here. We’ve had many deer right around our picnic table, including 3 bucks of varying ages (and racks!). Black bear have been seen in the area, just not by us! There are really so few bugs to speak of, so we decided not to bother with the screen room. Oh, one food note: we made steaks with Chimichurri SauceThursday night. Along with that we tried a new recipe I found on the internet. I cut a Vidalia onion in 8ths from the top down almost to the bottom, but not quite. I laid it in a double layer of aluminum foil that I folded up like a bowl. A pat of butter went in the center and then I sprinkled it with red pepper flakes. Finally, I poured Italian dressing over the top until it puddled around the bottom. Then we wrapped it all up in the foil and put it on the hot coals for 30 minutes. It was the hit of the meal! We will definitely make that again on this trip. Yummy!!!