Mountain Vacation

You can take the girl out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the girl.  Although I return to my mountain home every holiday season, never have I felt more relaxed and at home in that house and town and location as I did throughout the past week.

For an entire week, the Diva and I lived moment to moment.  We didn’t have real schedules to keep or things that we had to do.  We didn’t truly have people we had to see or places we had to be.  For an entire week, we relaxed.  

We took the dog for walks.

We explored the forests that I spent many hours in as a child with friends and with family.  I found the silence relaxing and peaceful while the Diva… well, she is a city girl at heart.  The silence in the forest is far different than the silence experienced on the beach or during the most quiet hours in a city.  It is nearly absolute in the forest at times.  The trees buffer those within from the outside world.  I reveled in the moments we spent amidst the trees.  

We hung our laundry on the clothes line outside!!  (And yes, for those on the east coast, the clothes actually dried quite quickly!)

The Diva spent many hours, by choice, at the sewing machine creating while I took a nap or two, read a bit, and thought of nothing!!  It was nice to have a quiet mind for a change.  

We ate wonderful food (because a vacation isn’t a vacation without food) and took long walks… and the Diva trained with the local high school cross country team, just for the fun of it.  She did really well, given the drastic difference in altitude between the mountain town and our DC metro home.  

We even saw a herd of elk as we crossed the top of the mountain to return to the airport for our flight east!

As we left the car to enter the airport for our flight to DC, I must admit that a few tears were shed.  We enjoyed our week; our time of relaxation so very much that it was difficult to leave that to return to the state of our lives as they currently stand in Virginia.  

But home is here for now; and, home is where we are now.  We brought back a sense of relaxation and a renewed sense of the joy of life – and these are things that we needed!  We also talked a lot about returning west every summer as we enjoyed ourselves so very much.