May
22
road trip!
Filed under family, travel, South Haven at 12:06 pm | 4 Comments
We took a road trip on Friday, and are now staying with my parents in South Haven, MI. Most of our pics likely won’t be online until I return home. Until then …
Rachel and Micah at a rest stop:
Road trips are fun:
Road trips are long:
May
14
our new garden
Filed under house, yard work at 8:54 pm | Leave a Comment
Apparently the ground in this part of Virginia is not naturally conducive to gardening. 
(Certain verses come to mind …) We planted a new garden in our back yard this weekend, and just below the grass is solid clay and rock. After much manual labor, we hope our excavation was of sufficient quality to yield a few different types of tomatoes, some squash, and rhubarb later this summer. The rhubarb came from my Grandma in MI originally, and has moved with us to every house we’ve owned.
Also just below the grass is our cable line. Comcast went all out burying that sucker … underneath a layer of grass seed. We were too far along in the excavating process to put the garden elsewhere, so we now have a couple flags marking the cable through the middle of our garden strip. Reminds me of other cabling they’ve done.
Thus far the plants are looking good, the sod we replanted elsewhere in the yard hasn’t completely died yet, and I’m still a bit sore from hauling all the dirt, clay, and rock. Nothing quite like weekend work to make you thankful for a desk job.
May
13
Last weekend we spent 3 days/2 nights at the beautiful Massanutten Resort
. It’s a huge resort (8,000 rooms) in the Shenandoah Valley. We really enjoyed our time there, and would love to go back.
To get the “free” stay we had to make a $75 deposit, and sit through a time share sales pitch. We knew this going in, and we escaped without purchasing anything. It wasn’t too bad, though they certainly had the process perfected. A dedicated sales person was assigned to tell us about the resort, give us a tour of the place, and give us the sales 
pitch. Once we said “no,” she got her manager to cut the prices in half. (I’m sure they don’t do that for just anyone.) After saying “no” to that, they shuffled us through a few other people that each verified some info, at which point we got our $75 deposit back as well as a $100 Visa card. Well worth it.
We stayed in one of the hotels on the resort (they also have condos for all the time share holders). It was a very nice hotel, with impressive staff and a lovely view of the mountains and the valley. The goal of the resort is to keep you on the resort, so they had plenty to do (horse riding, tubing, canoing, golfing, water park, pools, arcades). We went to one of the indoor pools, 
where Micah had his first swimming experience. He seemed to enjoy it.
It was nice seeing that portion of Virginia, and it was beautiful driving through the mountains. (We even crossed the Apalachian Trial, albeit in our car.) On the way there we hit up the Luray Caverns. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen caverns like that. They were impressive. The weekend was a good combination of adventure and relaxation.