Quiet Day, With Ducks

Photo at left by Sarah.
A quiet second day of the three days in the Valley. We all slept late. We went to the local visitor's center to gather brochures, and it's collocated with a little (one room basically) Valley Turnpike Museum, but I'm an old Shenandoah Valley addict and enjoyed that. Then a good country buffet lunch at Rowe's Country Buffet between here and Mount Crawford, VA, and an offshoot of the long-established Mrs. Rowe's restaurant in Staunton. After that we headed to the small town of Dayton, a nice old valley town where there are many buggy-driving Old Order Mennonites. Though both the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society in Dayton (where I've done a lot of genealogical reserch on two lines that came through Rockingham County, one German and one Scotch-Irish), and the Dayton Farmer's Market, a favorite of Tam's, we checked out an old mill (also closed Sunday) but did stop at a playground near the Historical Society where Sarah used to play when smaller and when I'd be in the library. She remembered it, and fed the dugs in the nearby stream, and took pictures, including the duck one above.

Because the video I took there isn't clear enough to show Sarah's face, I'm posting a video of it here:



We stopped at Wal-Mart to get swim goggles (yesterday we bought a swim suit because we'd left without them) but the outdoor pool would prove too cold for Sarah. But we'd done our best to remedy the situation. A brief stop at Jess' Lunch, the local dive/greasy spoon for our collection. Now I'm blogging and Sarah and Tam are watching a DVD of a Beethoven movie (the Saint Bernard, not the Composer). More later if there is more.

Tomorrow, en route home, we plan to do Luray Caverns. The Valley is full of caves, of which Luray is probably by far the most famous, but until fairly recently Sarah has said she'd find caves too spooky, and since they tend to be pricey we've held off. But during the Colorado trip she managed to convince us to take her on a tour of the Mollie Kathleen Mine in Cripple Creek, which is 1000 feet underground, has narrow tunnels and a cramped elevator: by comparison a cave should be roomy. So now that she's ready for claustrophobic underground adventures, we're going to do Luray.