A Sunday Road Trip

When Zach and Grace were younger, we frequently made road trips on weekend days. We’d drive to Shenandoah National Park or Bull Run or Manassas or Warrenton. We’d head to local places like Mount Vernon, or go for hikes around Burke Lake, or state parks in Maryland. We’d find places to eat, wander through shops, take tours. Our trips would fill the better part of a Saturday or Sunday and they were always fun to do.

After the Littlest Miss was born, these weekend adventures slowed, and then mostly stopped. It wasn’t because of the Littlest Miss. Instead, it was because of the increasing number of weekend activities that the other kids had as they got older. Today, a typical weekend is often filled with two-to-three soccer games (one to two for Zach and another one for the Littlest Miss), 2-1/2 hours of gymnastics team practice for Grace, flag football for Zach, girls scouts, and the occasional other things that come up. It makes it hard to get enough time for our road trips. But we managed to get one in yesterday.

Yesterday was Kelly’s birthday and she wanted to go to Middleburg, Virginia, a small town that we’d driven through on a number of occasions, about an hour away from our house. So, after picking up the kids from Sunday school, we hit the road. I had the GPS route us to avoid highways on the way there. Part of the point of the trip was to enjoy the scenery. We departed heading west under overcast skies, but we could see clear skies unrolled in front of us, and by the time we got out of the denser metropolitan D.C. area, the blue skies prevailed. The leaves here are just beginning to yellow, and there were a few places where we caught glimpses of reds and oranges. The drive took us through some horse country, and through rolling hills. It was a nice drive that seemed to fly by.

We arrived in Middleburg, and found street parking and then made our way to the Red Horse Tavern for lunch. The place was busy, but we came just before the real rush. We had a table outside on the patio. It was bright and sunny out there, a little warmed than I had expected, but we had a pleasant lunch. (I had the French Dip special.) From there, we wandered the town for a few hours, dipping into and out of shops that caught Kelly’s eye. There was a small nature hike that took us through the grounds of a private school. There was a Christmas Store that captured Kelly’s attention for a while. There was also a book store, but it turned out to be about the only shop in town that was closed on Sunday.

Just before three o’clock, we headed back to the car for the drive home. We might have stayed longer, but we wanted to try to get Grace home in time for her Girl Scouts meeting at 4 o’clock. We made it just in time.

It was nice to get back out on the road and go somewhere, just the five of us. Maybe, once the fall activities wrap up, we can do this more frequently, like we once used to do.