THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

And then it was time to leave. Packing things up went according to plan and we got out of there around 8:45 again. After saying good-bye to my parents and giving them our keys so they could check us out (since the condo is in their name) we headed back to Cincinnati. We took a nice shot of the mountains as we left:

Do you like it? Doesn’t it seem like you’re right there with us in Virginia? HAHAHAHA PSYCH! That’s actually a picture of one of the mountains in West Virginia. We tried to take a pic of the mountains right near the resort but it was too foggy and you couldn’t see anything. But hey all mountains are pretty much the same, right? This is more or less what it looked like

The trip went pretty much according to plan, the reverse of our trip there a week prior. We stopped for lunch in Tamarack, and here are the previously promised pictures of the “playground” - first here’s the “slide”:

And now we have the “jungle gym”

Since the theme of Tamarack is “The best of West Virginia” we of course deemed that this was “The best playground in West Virginia!”

One problem we were having is that Joel refused to sleep. He ended up eventually collapsing around 4:00. As we were getting close to Cincinnati, I realized that we were going to get there right in time for a Friday rush hour. After debating with myself, I decided to take a different way home. From Maysville, I turned right onto US 62/68. We headed through the booming metropolii of Aberdeen and Ripley, OH. For awhile, we were also tri-plexed with US 52, and for a few miles we were going both west (US 52 West) and east (US 62 East) at the same time. Not to mention north (US 68 North). I tried to get a picture of the conflicting signs, but this is the best I could do:

We followed US 68 North till we got onto OH 32 West, which we took into Cincinnati and then to home. All in all, I think it probably ended up taking us longer than it would have to just stayed the course, even considering rush hour, but oh well…

I hope you’ve enjoyed this “brief” recap of our week in Virginia, even though most of the people that read my blog were there with me anyways…

On Thursday, our last day to spend at the resort, we didn’t do a whole lot. We went back into town to the library and then just hung out for the rest of the day until dinner time. Then it was time for family picture fun! Getting pictures taken in general is pretty annoying, even when it’s just our family. Multiply that by about 4 or 5, and you can see the general madness that ensues.

Everyone had decided to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 this afternoon, but we didn’t go. We couldn’t have gone anyways, since with everyone gone there was nobody to watch our kids, but we had actually gone the night before. I had gotten free movie tickets due to a Sunny Delight deal, so we went and saw a late showing. I didn’t really like it. It was all right, but not nearly close to as good as the first one, IMO.

In any case, I was a bit annoyed that everyone had gone, because with a 2:45 showing, they weren’t going to be getting back till 6:15 or so, and that wasn’t leaving lots of time to take the family pictures before the kids had to be getting to bed. But it actually turned out fine.

Here’s a picture that we took of just our family while we were waiting for everyone to get back. Amy and Scott are actually both looking at the camera and somewhat smiling!!

Notice that we are all wearing red. The plan was for each sub-family to wear shirts of a different color. Makes the group photo come out much nicer. We had tried this 2 years ago, to much less success. There was no coordination between folks, and so we had us in red with someone else in maroon, and you couldn’t distinguish between us. Also, last time you were just supposed to wear either the same color or the same pattern, and one family wore stripes and you really couldn’t tell that they were all together. This year things worked much more smoothly, despite some initial confusion over what color burnt sienna really was and whether or not it was too close to red (it wasn’t)

Not one of the best pictures for our family, but that’s what happens when you try to coordinate 25+ people for like 10 pictures. Carolyn I believe is swatting at the gnats that kept attacking us, while Joel has clearly had enough. Carolyn also wants me to note that she is 30 weeks pregnant, not fat! Hopefully someone else’s camera has some better pictures. You can see there too my 5 year old cousin Aubrie who is younger than my 6 year old daughter

Wednesday started out pretty uneventful in the morning - we went to the park and swimming again. While at the park there was this other kid there that looked similar in age to Scott, and Scott and he were chasing each other around, but this kid was running circles around Scott. It was nice to see Scott interacting with someone else and having fun and all that. Later, I asked the kid how old he was, and he said “7 1/2″ and I thought well that explains it then… While we were at the swimming pool, I called around to find out what everyone else was doing, and found out that folks were heading to Reddish Knob. This was being billed as the tallest point in Virginia. This attracted the highpointer in me, so I decided to take Scott and go with everyone. The rest of the fam stayed back. It was supposedly a very gentle hike once you got to the top - only like 1/4 mile or so from where you park. We didn’t bring anything but sandals for Scott, but I hoped it would be okay - and I figured at worst I could just carry him 1/4 mile.

We headed west from the resort through Harrisonburg and into the George Washington National Forest. After driving up and up and up, and making a few stops to converse and determine where exactly we were going, we went around a corner and… we were there. There was no 1/4 mile hike, the top of the mountain was just a big blacktop parking lot (with a lot of graffiti).

That’s Scott making his “cheese” face. After we got back, I did some checking only to find out that not only is Reddish Knob at 4397 feet not only not the highest point in Virginia (that’s Mount Rogers at 5729 feet), but it’s not even the highest point in Augusta County (Elliott Knob at 4463 feet), so I was denied a county highpoint. I consoled myself by saying that at least I had visited a new county, but upon further review, I-81 goes through Augusta County so that wasn’t even a new county for me. Oh well, it was still a nice trip. In looking at the Google Map of the area, it appears that some of the roads that we drove on might be in West Virginia, which might be a new county or two, but it’s hard to know for sure.

In the afternoon, we had some Scottish highland games. My dad and my brothers are very into these Scottish games. We have a lot of Scottish ancestry on this side of the family. Or I guess I should say “they” do, since I’m not a blood relative :-). The bad part of this was that it decided to rain for the first time all week. When I had checked the 10-day forecast before we left it said “rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain” (literally). But the weather had been pretty nice until then. The rain didn’t last too long though, and we were able to get in a few good caber tosses.

That’s me admiring one of my tosses. I have to say, I didn’t find it to be that difficult at all. Of course, that it may have been due to the fact that instead of a regulation 20 foot long, 130 pound chunk of wood (think telephone pole), it was a 10 foot section of PVC pipe :-). At the games, we busted out the water balloon launcher, which has become sort of a staple event of these reunions. Here’s Scott “helping” my cousin Jake launch one.

Good times, good times…

On Tuesday, we decided to head into Harrisonburg and check out the library. One thing to note about these condos - no Internet access! I find it quite mind boggling really. I mean, when the Best Western and Motel 6 and even lower class hotels are offering free high-speed wireless access, it just seems odd that a high-class resort condo wouldn’t have it. Get with the aughts, people!!

I had meant to get a free AOL CD or something of the sort to bring with me to at least use dial-up, but forgot. So we headed there, not sure what to expect.

The library was actually very nice. It had a very big children’s section. Conveniently enough, when we got there, they were having a toddler story time, which the kids vaguely listened to and then played with the various toys and books and such while I checked my email.

While in town, we had to make a stop here:

With all my free time from no Internet at the condo, I passed the time by reading the Yellow Pages :-). And looky what we have here! I will say that there are times that having a pretty common name can be a detriment (such as trying to register family domain names), but there are times like these that are pretty sweet! When we pulled up, we initially thought that it said Carolyn L. Miller which of course would have been even cooler, but hey - this is pretty cool in and of itself.

Monday started the new week, and it’s a good time to show off some of the pics of the unit where we stayed:

That’s a picture of the outside of the condo (93). You can see our van in the “good” parking spot. Here’s a link to the description of the condo on RCI.

Here’s the front room. I’m standing in the kitchen, where instead of just giving us a stove/oven, they decided to give us 4 appliances to make up for one (grill, griddle, skillet and toaster oven). I’m not sure why they don’t just put in a stove. There was also a dining room area with a nice table off to the right of the pic, and down the hall, there are 2 bedrooms and 2 baths.

The main bathroom - there was a nice jacuzzi there, as you can see. It was quite large. There was another full bath off the master bedroom.

Our first try at sleeping arrangements was Amy in the master bedroom, with Joel and Scott sharing the other bedroom and us out on the pull-out sofa bed. That didn’t even last the first night. The sofa bed was of course poor quality, and eventually we kicked Amy out of the master bedroom bed and put her on the floor while we slept in the bed. We had some neighbor noise problems. You can see in the first picture that there are 2 units right next to each other. That actually wasn’t the problem. What you can’t see is that even in each unit (i.e. our condo of #93), there is an “Upper” and “Lower”. We were in the lower unit, which meant that we could hear all the stomping and general loudness of the folks above us. I’m not sure how well they could hear us, but we could hear just about everything they were doing, and they were up pretty late, especially that first night. It was annoying going back to “apartment-style” living, after years of living in a house. On the flip side, I’m sure they loved our kids yelling and crying and being loud at 6:45 in the morning….

As far as what we did on Monday, we went to a different indoor pool that was much better. Several of my cousins were also there and it was a fun time. Various pool games involving a football were played. And of course they tried to dunk me. It took 5 of them about 10 minutes but eventually they managed to do it. I think we went swimming again in the afternoon.

Monday was our night to make dinner for everyone and we went with the same thing we did last time - taco salad. I was able to get a sweet deal on Doritos (12 bags for $4) before we left, and it’s a pretty easy thing to make. Annoyingly, not only had we forgot taco seasoning from home, we forgot it at the store, and had to ask one of my aunts and uncles to pick it up. We still owe them $7 that we forgot to pay them back while we were there.

And then it was Sunday! Plan was to leave at 8:15, to allow plenty of time to drive into Harrisonburg for church. We got there in plenty of time, and found it without problem. As we were driving there, Carolyn saw the tattoo parlor next door and said something to the effect of “Yeah I remember there was a tattoo parlor next door.” I, being the witty person that I am, told her that it would have been much more impressive to remember the tattoo parlor before we actually got there. She hit me

The 20 or so of us made quite the entrance, I’m sure. We were even welcomed by name from the pulpit during the opening announcements (”Welcome to the Groesbeck family”). They probably get lots of people that are staying in Massanutten.

Church was about as crazy as could be expected. We weren’t sure whether or not to stay for the full 3 hours, since messing up Amy’s routine can prove interesting, and Joel has been going through a phase where he doesn’t like to be in nursery. In the end, it proved moot as Joel was going pretty crazy anyways, so we decided to punt.

Dinner was jambalaya, which looked fairly scary but was actually very good. I passed out the rest of my autism letters to those that didn’t get one.

I have arbitrarily decided that Friday, the day of travel, was Day 0. I suppose it just as easily could have been considered Day 1. But it’s my blog and I’ll name how I want, thank you very much.

So on Saturday, my Dad and Suzy made the trip up from Blacksburg to visit with us. This worked out to be great timing, since the rest of the Groesbecks were checking in on Saturday, so they weren’t even there yet. In the morning, we took the kids to the pool and swam around. We went for the indoor pool, since when I took a step outside to check how cold it was, it was umm dang cold.

After Dad and Suzy got there, we hung out for awhile while Joel took a nap. After he woke up, we went down to the park area. There, Amy mostly wandered around, looking longingly at the pool and wanting to go swimming. Here are some pics of the kids at the park:

It was quite hot there in the afternoon. Smarter folks than us would probably have done the park in the morning, when it was cool out, and then the pool in the afternoon, when it was hot out. But hey, we’re fools like that!

At around dinner time, we headed next door to my other parents’ place for dinner. On the menu for Saturday night was hamburgers and hot dogs, which was good. I also passed out copies of a letter we had written with some general facts about autism as well as specific things about Amy. We thought that it would be a good idea to just let my various relatives know about Amy, just giving them more ideas of how to actually interact with her. If any of you would like a copy of it, just let me know and I will send one to you.

We missed most of my relatives on Saturday evening, since by the time they made it in, we had already gone back to our place to put Joel to bed. The rest of the evening was fairly uneventful.

Okay then. I’m sure you’ve really missed all my witty insights over the past few weeks. But never fear, because I am back with a vengeance. As you may or may not know, the fam and I just spent the past week in McGaheysville, Virginia, at the Massanutten Resort (thanks for not looting our house while we were gone). We took a few pictures over the course of the week, and now it’s time to give a full report of the week’s adventuring.

I will pull a Braden and break this up into several different posts, and of course I will be backdating them.

So we started off last Friday (umm I mean “today”) from our lovely house. Planned departure time was 8:00 AM. Well, actually, our planned time was to tell ourselves 8:00 so that we’d actually leave at 8:30, so according to that, our actual departure time of 8:44 was close enough.

We stopped by the bank to get out some money. It’s a good thing that we did because we spent exactly $0 of that cash during the week… Though actually we do owe my aunt and uncle $7 of that, but more on that later.

And like that, we were off. The route we chose was one that we have driven many many times before. 71 South to 471 South to US 27 South to our good friend the Double A Highway. We drove past the Cold Spring KY Meijer on the way there (it’s at the intersection of 27 and the AA), but I did not stop for any more Nature Valley Granola bars and/or free Mueller pasta.

The AA was pretty uneventful. Copious amounts of insistence that I was going to do things my way on the Double A highway were had, etc. etc. I did pass by the Maysville Kroger and waved. Upon reaching the completion of the AA highway, I snapped a picture of one of my favorite signs of all time:

I mean I know McDonalds is cool and all, and Grayson probably isn’t that big but I’m not sure I’d call it a tourist attraction… I’m not sure why only McDonalds gets on the sign either - there’s also a Wendy’s and a Hardee’s and probably more. In any case, if you’re interested, here is where that picture is located. For some reason, Google insists on calling the “AA” KY 694 when actually it is KY 9.

We made our first stop of the day at the Super Quik which is about 1/4 mile to the right of this picture. We have stopped there many times on various trips to Virginia - it’s not a bad stopping point, depsite them apparently allowing smoking in the bathroom, which smelled.

We then started the long journey through West Virginia on I-64 East. One thing I find nice about this trip is that it is easily broken up into hourish-increments.

• Cincinnati to Maysville
• Maysville to I-64
• I-64 to Huntington (this is actually closer to 30 minutes)
• Huntington to Charleston
• Charleston to Beckley
• Beckley to the Virginia border
• VA border to I-81
• I-81 to Harrisonburg

That makes it seem to go by faster, at least to me, since you’re always no more than an hour or so from the next waypoing. West Virginia was as uneventful as it usually is, except for…

We hit 100,000 miles on the van. The 2nd picture is (approximately) where we were when we hit - that’s about 25 miles south of Charleston WV on the WV turnpike. I’ve been noticing that we were close for awhile, and when we started out I saw that we would hit it on the trip. I was very nervous I was going to forget about it and miss it, but luckily I didn’t. Or, more accurately, all of the times I forgot about it were before it mattered, and I remembered in time.

We made our second stop at ….TAMARACK! just south of Beckley WV. I’m not sure why we find Tamarack to be so funny. Is it the comparisons to the Monty Python Camelot song? or the fact that it seems so pointless? Or the fact that it is severely over-hyped? You can’t go 10 miles on the WV Turnpike without seeing a sign like this (pic stolen off the Internet)

We have some pictures of the “playground” that the kids played on there, but I’ll save those for a future post. One picture that we didn’t get was of an old woman. There was a life-sized doll of an old woman sleeping, that was just laid out on a rocking chair there. That, not so funny. But there was a “real” old woman sleeping (or just resting maybe) in the rocking chair right next to it, and that was quite funny. But by the time we had both independently noticed that and decided to take a picture (and scoped out a place where we could surreptitiously take a picture of her), she was gone. Alas….

A few hours later, we realized that we could probably make it all the way to Harrisonburg without stopping again, so we went for it. Nicely, despite no real coordination, my parents also arrived there within 5-10 minutes. That was nice because since the timeshare we were staying in is in their names, we couldn’t check in without them. We did some shopping at the Kroger there for the week ahead. 2 years ago we shopped at the Wal-mart there, but this time I wanted to go to Kroger since I still have a bunch of gift cards from the Kikkoman deal from a few weeks ago. We had brought a few things from the General Store, but annoyingly we forgot taco seasoning (we have about 50 packets of them at home) and pepperoni (ditto). Paying for both of these things irked me to no end.

And then…. we were there!

More to follow!