Mini-trip day 2

Day two of our Virginia adventure started in our hotel.  We had breakfast and since Claire didn't get out of class until noon, decided to hit up the gym.  At this hotel, it consisted of a small room with two treadmills, a bike, and an elliptical - functional.  Here we are pre-workout:

sleepy faces.

 At 12, we picked Claire up, grabbed some lunch at Sheetz (yay for gas station food!), and headed toward Bedford to hike at Peaks of Otter.  Peaks of Otter is a hike I did several times when I was in college.  It is so beautiful at the top, I really wanted to do it again.  I guess I had never done it this early in the year because I don't ever remember it being this cold.  There was frost on all the trees, which was really beautiful.  My camera phone + no photography skills did not capture it well.

frost up close.

Me and Brian under a frosty evergreen.

 In order to convince Brian to do this hike, I may have used words like "challenging" and also focused on it's shorter length ("It's only a mile and a half one way").  Maybe I should have said that it's hard and steep and there are a lot of stone steps, because this is what he looked like on the hike:

grumpy Brian.

Okay, he wasn't that bad.  Do you notice the water droplets in his beard?  The mountain was misty/foggy and Brian was warm, so condensation was forming in his beard - crazy.

The hike is definitely challenging and we stopped to take rests:

But the view at the top is totally worth it!  

See the frost on all the trees?

We all felt better about the hike once we got to the top and saw the amazing views.

triple self-portrait :)

 After making our way (much more quickly) down the mountain, we tried our best to get the mud off our shoes before collapsing in the car and heading back to Blacksburg.  We were rewarded with a gorgeous sunset on our trip back:

silly truck blocking my view.

We grabbed a quick dinner, said our goodbyes to Claire and hit the road back to Tennessee.