I should have listened to the sweaty people. We had just finished the Bearfence rock scramble — one of the best things I’ve done in recent memory — and were feeling thoroughly pleased with ourselves when we drove down Skyline Drive to the Dark Hollow Falls trailhead. It was the same trip, the same day,…
My daughter showed up Friday night with a cake. Not a regular cake. A sushi cake. Layers of sushi rice, tuna and salmon tataki, cucumber, avocado, seaweed salad, masago, eel sauce, sriracha, Japanese mayo — stacked into an actual cake shape and topped with fish roe and a “Happy Birthday” written in Sriracha. From scratch….
There is something about doing hard things with your daughter. Not the kind of hard that involves tears or crisis or the particular drama that mothers and daughters are capable of generating together — we are very good at that kind too, trust me. I mean the quiet kind of hard. The kind where you…
The original plan had been caverns. Nobody mentioned anything about a 900-foot elevation gain. The Morning After Christine and I are both early risers, and this Sunday morning in our Harrisonburg hotel room was no different. The moment we each realized the other was awake, I whispered “Good morning.” She whispered back “How are your…
The original plan was four caverns. We got three. And honestly, we earned every single one of them. The Drive Up Christine and I left early on March 7th, heading west toward the Shenandoah Valley. If you’ve never driven into the mountains from the Virginia coast, let me tell you — the moment the landscape…
There’s a small state park about five minutes from my house that I drove past for four years without ever stopping. I wanted to. Every time I passed the entrance I’d think I should walk those trails sometime. But doing things alone in the woods as a woman is a different calculation than just lacing up your…