April 27, 2015.  At noon today we arrived at Sherando Lake Recreational Area, a beautiful federal park about 15 miles south of the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We will stay here for three nights as we make day trips in the truck to points of interest nearby.   We were surprised to learn that there are no water hook-ups here.  We had to drive the Airstream to a special place to load up with 39 gallons of water.  If that does not last us for three days, we will have to secure everything, hook back up to the truck and drive the 500 yards to fill up with more water.  That process takes about an hour and is a LOT of work.  Therefore, we will be taking showers in the bath house across the way and using water very sparingly.   I think we’ll be able to make 39 gallons stretch for three days.  At least we have a big incentive to conserve.

This afternoon we drove to Lexington VA where I attended summer school in 1973.  I was enrolled in the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), taking a course in archeology, but all classes were held on site at the dig at Liberty Hall, which is in the outfield of the baseball field of Washington & Lee Univ.  I was the only girl in the class, the only one to wear yellow bikini to the site every day, and (I was told) the only one to get an A.  Brad asked if the professor was a fat woman, but I don’t recall any professor.  Using a paint brush in the dirt on the third-base side, I discovered a “possible post hole” which made all kinds of news, and made Daddy so glad that he had paid my tuition for the summer!

Although Lexington is my old stomping ground, I hardly recognized anything.  Many things have shifted and changed in the last 42 years, and in this case, I’m talking about the town itself.  The fancy old Keydet General Hotel, where I ate many a club sandwich with various friends’ parents, is something else now and may even be even out of business – it was hard to tell.  My old apartment building – a beautiful white Georgian landmark in the middle of town — appears to have been torn down.  At least I was not able to find it, and it was quite remarkable.  I did find Lime Kiln Road, where my old boyfriend and four of our friends lived in a house rented to them by The Reverend Frifth, who made frequent sneak visits to make sure there were in fact no girls, beer  or dogs in evidence, per the rental agreement.   I spent a lot of time in a closet there (with Samantha the dog and a pony keg).  The house was still there, but it was surrounded by houses less than 42 years old, and thus had lost some of its rural charm.  The old store down the street (f/k/a Woods Creek Grocery) where we used to stock up on National Bohemian is now a cute little ice cream shop.  Is nothing sacred?  I couldn’t  find any of the old fraternity houses.  Maybe they have collapsed into a keg of iniquity – which would not be surprising, but I wish I could have seen it!

During the regular school year, I actually attended Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Roanoke VA about 50 miles south of Lexington on I-81.  As many times as I hitchhiked up and down I-81 between Hollins and Lexington (gas was hard to come by in the early 1970s due to OPEC shenanigans. and my jacked-up electric blue 1968 Mustang only got 8 mpg), I must have passed the sign to Natural Bridge a million times and never stopped until today!  Brad and Doris and I were thrilled to walk down the 167 steps to the incredible natural bridge!  The arch is 215 feet high, consists of 450,000 cubic feet of rock weighing 72,000,000 pounds and is estimated to be over 500 million years old!   I don’t know about that, but I do have a 1901 photograph of my grandmother with two of her small daughters and a baby nurse having a picnic at the foot of Natural Bridge.  It looks so inviting in the photo and it would be today except that it is a bit more developed (but not all that much).  A brass plaque near the entrance states that the original patent for Natural Bridge was surveyed by George Washington in about  1750, and it was granted to Thomas Jefferson on July 5, 1776, who proclaimed it “The most sublime of Nature’s work.”

We returned to Sherando Lake on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which was so pretty I almost ran out of energy gasping and exclaiming.  The photos are pitiful representations of the glory that unfolds around every curve – and there are plenty of those!  If you have not driven the BRP in the last 10 years, you owe it to yourself to get in the car and head there right now.