Saturday morning we headed out early for Camden, where Charlie and his teammates were running in their last cross country meet of the season. It was their first time running in really cold weather, so Andrew & Jenny had taken Char the night before to get him a hat, gloves, and tights to try to fight that chill. And it must have worked – he ran a PR by 21 seconds. So proud of this kid!

Monday morning Jeff & I were at Larne Elementary to celebrate Veterans Day with Mason. The school always provides a really good breakfast for us, and then each veteran is introduced in the assembly. Mason’s teacher, who is a friend from church, took this picture of us as that was happening. That’s Mrs Stine, the principal, shaking hands with Jeff

Last Tuesday, when we were starting out on our Virginia trip with our church Forever Young group, we had lunch at Emory and Henry College, and toured the new Arts Center.  We did not, however, have time to visit the chapel, so we made a stop on the way home just to peek inside the sanctuary.  The stained glass was beautiful.

Last week when we were in Abingdon, Meg & I spent some time before supper Weds evening wandering around the grounds of the Martha Washington Inn.  They had lovely gardens tucked into every nook and cranny.  So pretty.

That evening was the ghost tour.  So much fun, and such great history of the area.  We stopped about halfway through to rest and get some water at The Tavern, the oldest building in VA – and surely one of the oldest in the US.  It was very cool.

When we were in Virginia on the trip with our Forever Young group from church, my friend Pam’s aunt, who lives there, made arrangements for one of the historical interpreters that she is good friends with to come to the Muster Grounds and present a program for us.  It was so, so good.  She talked about just life around the time of the Revolutionary War, and one thing she talked about was their clothes.  She said that they literally wore clothes until they wore completely out, and that there was a very good change that you were wearing clothes that belonged to your ancestors.  Very interesting.

Last Sunday the girls and I got home from Beaufort just in time for Jeff & me to get to Clara’s soccer game not TOO late.   They played hard & even though they lost, it was much closer than the last time they played this team earlier in the season.  It was a beautiful afternoon to be out, so she had quite the cheering section there at this home game 🙂

This new national part, formerly a national monument, is very interesting.  It is actually made up of several different sites, including a couple of St Helena Island that are tied to the beginning of the Penn Center, and the camp at the Naval Hospital.  Tours are offered to those sites on different days, and the visitors center is always open.  It is in a great restored old building in downtown Beaufort, and even though it is small, it has some really interesting exhibits about reconstruction:  economics of the time, education, politics.  Very well done, of course.

This weekend Lindee, Addie, & I went on our annual birthday trip to Beaufort, SC.  What a great time we had, and what a wonderful place to visit.  Our first stop was before we actually got into Beaufort, where we stopped to explore the Sheldon Church Ruins, a church that was built before the Revolutionary War, and burned not long afterwards.  Very interesting and so beautiful.

Back in the spring, our Forever Young group from church visited the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, but we didn’t stay long enough for some of us to see everything we wanted to see.  So yesterday Meg, Mike, & I headed back over to finish exploring all of the displays.  I remembered to take just a couple of pictures with my phone, so I could record it on here.  Not only did it have rooms about Earl Scruggs, there was also lots of history scattered throughout of the Shelby area and its people.  There were recorded interviews of people and how they lived growing up in the area that were very interesting.  I especially enjoyed this one.

In the upstairs gallery was an exhibit of paintings by David Colton, I believe his name was, who is a music photographer – he photographs bands and singers all over the world.  The main part of this exhibit was about singers and musicians from North Carolina, which was very cool, but I also enjoyed the little room of some of his favorite pictures of musicians and bands he’d photographed elsewhere.  This one about Johnny Cash was one of my favorites.