#4

On October 15th Evan and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary!  The weekend before we went to a b&b in west virginia.  i spent the summers after my sophomore and junior year in college working as an "adventure facilitator" for alpine ministries.  they were two of the best summers ever!  i learned how to guide white water trips, rappel, and cave a.k.a. spelunking.  we also did a lot of hiking, biking, and team building activities...and of course we had some fun along the way.

i'm the one guiding the boat.  matthew is on the opposite side in the back

i'm the only one without a paddle

spelunking with dad, anna, and matthew

a collage i made after my first year... i'll have to add more from my second year sometime

so i really wanted to take evan to some of my favorite hiking spots out there.  the gorge is beautiful in the fall and it turned out to be a great weekend.

i love the drive out to the gorge!  it is beautiful!! i thought it would be fun to stop at an orchard and pick some apples on our way out there.  that didn't quite turn out like i had hoped...

the people at the orchard said they had already picked the apples.  if we found any apples we could have them for FREE... we were sure we could find some!! 

there were NO apples on the trees!!!  well, we found two but we needed a fire truck ladder to get to them.

oh well.... 

what they did have PLENTY of stink bugs... gross!!

we headed on to wva... of course with a pit stop at...  mmmmm....

we made it to bluefield around 7:30 and EVERYTHING was shut down.  i was starting to regret my decision about wva... no offense to any wvaers.  we ate some horrible fast food and head to the dian-lee house

it was great!  we stayed in the murphy brown room.  there was cheese, wine, and roses to greet us. (thanks mom and dad). 

the next morning we had a delicious breakfast and headed out to the gorge to do some hiking!  first stop was fern creek!

Evan was wearing his anniversary gift, new chacos!

evan carefully looking over the edge

showing off my knowledge of the new river rapids... or what i remember of them  

double z is the top rapid and bus stopper is the lower rapid

after a couple hour hike we headed into fayetville for lunch at the cathedral cafe

the milkshake was really this good!

we were super hungry, but i think this was one of the top sandwiches i have ever eaten

then we were off to our last hike, long point.

new river gorge bridge

when we were in car i got a message that we had a surprise when got back...

if you ever pass through bluefield, wva and need a place to stay, dian-lee house is really nice, just don't expect to do much in bluefield.  :)

on our way home we stopped mr. j's bagels!!!!  one of my favorite places while i was at jmu!!

evan's chocolate chip muffin was huge

looooove orange juice muffins!

a great way to end a great weekend