Adventures in Life
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As nature lovers, hiking has been one of our go-to outdoor activities over the years. We’ve gradually gotten smarter about what to take with us to make our hiking experience enjoyable (and safe). Check out our ultimate guide to hiking gear! Our guide is geared to day-hikers, not backpackers, which is something we may get into some day but haven’t yet!
As we shared previously, in 2022 we finally did something we had talked about doing for decades. We bought our own recreational land for camping and hiking. We wanted a spot within a reasonable driving distance of our home so distance wouldn’t hinder us from enjoying it, we wanted to be at a higher elevation to escape the hotter, more humid temperatures at lower elevations, and we wanted views. Check, check, check, and check! Laurel Ridge, which is what we named our mountain getaway, meets all of these, though it didn’t check our fifth box of having running water, though we believe there are likely springs that are on our list to search for.
I am not a deep attention-to-details type of person, so the idea of building anything like a model has never appealed to me. (In this, Dustin and I are polar opposites.) So, I’m surprised as anyone that I decided to tackle building a gingerbread house this year. And not only that. I actually enjoyed it!
Candles have the power to transform a room with their low, flickering light adding warmth, coziness, and ambiance. Particularly in the seasons of the year with longer nights, we enjoy striking some matches, lighting the wicks and relaxing with the low candle light.
Starting way back with our first trip camping, we started a packing list to make life easy when it was time to gather our gear and head into the wild. Over the years, we have continued to update and grow the list based on supplies we find helpful. While we started out with most of our camping gear from Target, we have continued to upgrade our supplies over the years to have longer lasting, higher quality gear.
As I shared in our prior post which you can read here, we are the new owners of a 130-acre plot of mountain land, which we have named Laurel Ridge, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of our home state of Virginia. In hiking the multiple trails already cleared, we have come across really interesting features as well as various found objects (about which we’ll write more in the future). We quickly found ourselves with a lengthy list of all the really cool things we want to do, as well as some of the less fun but practical necessities like clearing brush from the trails before nature takes over.
For years we have talked about the idea of buying a chunk of land as our own personal getaway for hiking, camping, and relaxing. For most of those years, the reality was quite a ways out of reach. A distant dream at best.
In the past handful of years it become less distant, more possible, and I spent more hours than I’d like to count trolling realtor.com and zillow.com to check out available land. In the first six months of COVID, we began looking a bit more seriously because after all, you can’t get much safer than your own private, isolated vacation spot.
In our prior post, we shared what led us to attempt making our own soap. We covered the tools we used, the fun choices we made (like soap color and scent), and the process we followed. While everything seemed to go well, the question remained: Would this soap actually work?
The story is familiar. A Sunday morning bacon breakfast, seared steaks on the skillet. What they make gets transferred to plates and devoured. What they leave behind is a goopy, fatty mess in the frying pan.
Life is all about perspective.
We went camping for a couple of nights earlier this summer at Loft Mountain Campground, a short drive up Skyline Drive, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains about an hour northwest of Charlottesville.
Our SUV was packed to the gills with all matter of perishable and non-perishable human and dog supplies. Also humans and dogs. We had to dig our camping box out of the basement and dust it off. Somehow we hadn’t gone camping in 8 years. This is one of those unnerving moments of adulthood where something that feels familiar and recent hasn’t occurred in many years.
We spent a week in Paris back in April 2019. With everything that has happened since, that truly seems like a lifetime ago and a galaxy away. If you think a week in Paris is enough time to see everything on a standard first-timer’s list, think again.
I became a runner about twelve years ago. An actual quote from me that year, which Dustin can verify: “I’ll never be able to run a mile.”
I can pin my dislike of running on a handful of physical education teachers in middle school and high school. As an adult, I’m appalled by this because the entire reason the state requires physical education is to ensure students are healthy and develop good habits to keep them healthy as they age. In retrospect, I wonder if I would have found my love for running much earlier under other circumstances.