I LOVE TO EXPLORE ....

I must say that I love exploring new places. I guess that is obvious since I am currently in a random town in western Virginia. This week has so far been quite eventful. On Sunday, Richard and I met in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to check out the Wake Forest campus. It was so interesting. For a school that is so well known around the US, it only has about 7,500 students on campus! And that's undergrad AND graduate students. It's a private school that was founded by a Baptist minister back in 1834. Yeah, not too long after the US was organized :) The reason why it is called Wake Forest is because it started in a town called Wake Forest over by Raleigh, but they decided to uproot the school and take it to Winston-Salem (on the west side of NC) in 1956. Guess what, if my school was 20 minutes away from UNC and Duke, I would have done the same thing. Anyway, now I'm rambling. It's just that we had such a great time wandering around. It almost made me want to be a Demon Deacon. Yeah, that's their mascot. Seems to be quite a juxtaposition if you ask me ... but to each his own.

Their auditorium. Believe it or not, there is a very cool organ behind that rod iron.

Okay, their campus reminded me of Nauvoo. I was just waiting to see Brigham Young's general store or something.

Fun patio furniture on the fun brick walkways :)

Very cool tennis courts. If Richard had only brought his racquet.

Dickie striking a pose.

Their football stadium, with the Demon Deacon out front and center.

Rich will be applying to be the Demon mascot next season. He'll be a shoe-in with that face.

My face: not as good.

The sun was setting as I was driving home ... and I had to capture it.

This is the lake by the Davis' house, and that is their boat. I call it the party boat because you can fit like 15 people on it.

Anyone in this little community can put their boats in here.

So now we're cutting to a hike I did yesterday. I hiked for 6.6 miles on the Appalachian Trail with Melanie (the mom) and April (one of her graduated Young Women). I don't think I've hiked since .... let me think .... Girl's Camp. So yes, I am sore today. But it was fun. And when you hike in this humid weather, you're bound to lose a pound or two of pure perspiration.

The majority of the hike looked like this. Very cool.

This is Melanie rockin' the "Harriet Tubman" look.

It was so gorgeous.

Kind of hard to see, but this is us at the top.

And this is a shot of the town of Blacksburg, where Virginia Tech is.