We went exploring around Charlottesville today with Mike. He took us first to the place they had rented for a couple years about a half hour outside of town. It is on a small farm. They really did not live there all that time because Mike was working in Portland for close to a year and Ellen was in Kenya as part of her Fulbright fellowship. Their apartment - somehow both John and I failed to take a picture of it - is above the garage. It had a few of pastures and an old barn.
John loved the barn. He has been searching for antlers for the play we are doing, and he would have walked off with this deer hunting prop if he could have.
It almost made him want to take up farming.
There was a large and rather creepy building further back on the property. We think it was used to keep hunting dogs, but it is hard to be certain.
From her we headed up into the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park. Along the road we came across a reconstruction of a pioneer homestead.
The view as we were driving along was spectacular.
Back on King Mountain Road I did a little work. Their sun room is such a pleasant place to pass the time.
Later on, we went into town. Charlottesville is in the South, so there was the inevitable heroic statue of Robert E. Lee.
We had dinner at a small restaurant. We were joined by two friends of Ellen’s from the Semester at Sea program. The woman on the bottom right - I am blanking on her name - works at Monticello and provided us with four free tickets for tomorrow. The man in the bottom right, her boyfriend, is working on his Ph.D. at UVa in Tibetan Buddhism. Both of them were really nice, nice people.
