The Monkey Gets Spanked

I couldn't post last night. The newly-renovated Stonewall Jackson Hotel in Staunton, VA was the priciest and nicest place we have stayed on this trip, but their wireless network wouldn't let me access the internet....something about their router not assigning an IP address to my laptop. Anyway, they couldn't fix it, and neither could I. Both Diamond Jim and Pitstop have air-cards on their laptops and don't have to rely on hotel wifi, but neither one would go retrieve their computer from their bike so I could use it. They muttered something about being tired of me sitting at the computer all night.

Thursday night we treated ourselves to good blues and good home-cooked food at the train depot in Shephardstown, WV courtesy of the good people of the Save The Shephardstown Battlefield Society. Ten dollars bought us all we could eat of home made fried chicken, meat balls, lasagna, macaroni salad, pasta salad, fresh green salad, etc. and great music by The Hard Swimmin' Fish, a most excellent blues band (photo from their website) http://www.hardswimminfish.com/HTML_files/biographyNew.html


We left Shepardstown and headed for Staunton, home of the Statler Bothers, where Jim's daughter, Piper, now lives. She introduced us to the wild nightlife of Staunton (anybody who lives there, or has visited, knows what I'm talking about).

On the ride to Staunton, we searched out more back roads. We followed one sign that pointed the way to White Oak Canyon Falls, near Sperryville, VA. Route 600 that takes you to White Oak Canyon is a gem of a narrow, twisting, tree-tunnel of a road. White Oak Canyon is part of Shenandoah National Park. The ranger said the hike to the lower falls was 1.5 miles. That had to be the longest, toughest 1.5 miles I ever hiked, and the down-hill return seemed even longer. However, Little Buddy enjoyed the hike and really enjoyed the the falls.



As you probably know, a big low has settled over the Tennessee and Ohio Valleys, sucking in massive amounts of moisture from the Gulf Of Mexico and depositing it throughout the southeast for the last week, causing major flooding in many places. When we couldn't go west to the Grand Canyon due to the illness of Ron's mom, we at least wanted to go to Nashville for a couple of nights of good music. The constant downpour throughout Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and North Carolina put a wet damper on that plan. The weather radar has dictated the route for this entire ride, and today was no exception. When we arose this morning in Staunton, the radar said "go east", hence we are now on the coast of VA in Kilmarnock, about as far east as we could get today.

On the way here, we took Cross County Rd to Cuckoo, VA.

We also passed through Bumpass, VA. Little Buddy got a kick out of the Bump ass sign.

Little Buddy was a bad boy today. From his perch on the back of Zoom Zoom....


he wolf whistled at some girls on the sidewalk as we pulled into Kilmarnock. The girls, of course, thought it was me, and gave me a witheringly nasty look....very embarrassing. Little Buddy had to be disciplined. This is the only shot ever recorded of me spanking the monkey.