Fernandez Family of Five: Mountain Getaway...

Every year we try to go on one week-long trip to somewhere we have not been before. We want our girls to be able to see different parts of the country with us before they graduate from college. This year we were not able to make a week long trip work due to several circumstances but we were able to pull off a 3.5 day trip to the mountains, July 11 - July 14. We are blessed by great managers at Tony's store and also points on our credit card that we were able to redeem for cash so that we could make this trip work. We have been wanting to go to West Jefferson for quite some time so we finally did. We stayed in a nice mountain cabin, enjoyed the sites/stores in the town, went hiking on some beautiful trails, saw some pretty waterfalls (thanks to all the rain), went river canoeing and ate some great food. It was a fun family trip and here is a lot of photos to capture the fun and beauty that we saw.

We visited the Ashe County Cheese Store in West Jefferson. You can watch them make cheese and then they also have a store where you can buy all their products. The cheese is really good and was a favorite for all of us.

Daddy and Riley trying to make up their mind on what cheeses to buy.

Here is the plant where they make their cheeses. We got to watch
some of the process.

Here is the porch of our mountain cabin. We hoped to sit out on this porch reading a lot and enjoying the views, but it rained a good bit and our view was mainly of white clouds the whole weekend. We did get a few breaks in the clouds but not many.

Here is the inside of the cabin - family room.

Master bedroom...

This is where Riley and Reece slept.

Regan's room...

Kitchen...

Our cabin and the view (the last morning when we were leaving the clouds started to lift, the sun started to shine, and we had to say "goodbye" to the beautiful view.) :(

Here is the view from our porch the last morning.

The cabin had a few games and the girls loved playing, "LIFE." I remember loving this game as a child too and it teaches you a lot about life. We played this game a lot during the weekend and then when we got home the girls bought this game with a giftcard they had. Now, they have been playing it everyday since we got home.

The first night, we enjoyed a family style, all-you-can-eat, country cooking dinner at Shatley Springs Inn. It was the best home cooking we have ever had. We had ham, fried chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, pinto beans, baked apples, coleslaw, biscuits, and cobbler for dessert. We were all stuffed after the meal. It felt like a Thanksgiving meal, minus the turkey. They are open on Thanksgiving and take reservations which book up really fast. They said their reservations are already 1/3 the way full. We entertained the idea of getting a large, mountain cabin or two and having both of our families join us up here for Thanksgiving. We should definitely do that in the future!

There was a basement in our mountain cabin and daddy discovered that there was a talking deer mounted on the wall. Regan was taking a shower down in the basement and Daddy plugged in the talking deer. When she was heading back upstairs she turned off the lights and the deer started talking and singing. We heard this loud burst of laughter and she came hightailing it up the stairs to tell us. Tony was really hoping I would find the talking deer first because my reaction would have been priceless.

Our GPS led us in the wrong direction one day and we ended up on a little, gravel road alongside the New River. It was actually a beautiful drive and gave us a great view of the river. This was the river we went canoeing on.

Riley hiking at Mt. Jefferson State Park.

Holding up the rock....

We went hiking at Mt. Jefferson State Park and it was a very foggy, rainy day. The trail had brochures for the kids to use along the hike. The brochure gave facts about different animals and plants you may see along the trail and activities you could do along the trail to act like these animals. Some of the activities were seeing how far you could jump (like a grasshopper), standing on one leg for as long as you can (like a hawk), hopping like a green frog, flapping your arms as fast as you can for 30 secs (like a Hummingbird), running as fast as you can while zig zagging (like a rabbit) and doing push ups to see if you can hold up your body weight like an ant. Reece added to this activity by seeing if daddy could hold up his own body weight plus carry something while doing it, just like an ant carries food. We were the only ones on the trail (as far as we knew) so we were acting pretty crazy, making the most fun out of our rainy, foggy, cold weather day of hiking. We got good exercise too and were quite sore the next day.

We thought this sign was appropriate...

On Saturday, we decided to hike Mt. Jefferson again since the weather was a little nicer this day.

Riley at the top of Luther Rock trail at Mt. Jefferson State Park. The first day we went out on this ledge it was foggy, misting and the view was totally white. It felt like we were on a mountain island with nothing around us. This day it was much different and we could actually see what was around us.

The views at the top of Luther Rock at Mt. Jefferson State Park.

After hiking at Mt. Jefferson, we went into downtown West Jefferson to look in the shops. We came across a visitor's center and asked them about more hiking trails. The worker told us about a neat trail, called "Cascade Falls", about 20 mins. away on the Blue Ridge Parkway that had a pretty waterfall. We decided to go and give it a try. I am so glad we did because it ended up being a beautiful trail to hike on and the waterfall was neat too.

The stream along the Cascade Falls Trail. The girls enjoyed looking for rocks in this stream.

The pretty views of the stream...

The Rhododendron were in bloom and beautiful...

The Cascades waterfall...

The upper falls overlook...

Another overlook...

After hiking the Cascade Falls Trail, we came across this big, grassy hill overlook along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We were excited, thinking on the other side of this hill would be an amazing panoramic view of the mountains. We ran/walked up this hill (very tiring) and when we got to the top it was just trees!!!

But, at least there were pretty views off to each side of the hill.

Here I am doing an impression of Julie Andrews in the "Sound of Music" when she is dancing around on top of the hills in the Swiss Alps. This hill reminded me of that movie. So, I was dancing and singing "The hills are alive with the sound of music, ahh ahh ahh ahh..." :) Tony and the girls thought I was crazy, but I was having fun!

Then, Tony started having fun with his own echo. It was a perfect place to hear your echo. Yes, we were acting like a bunch of kids.

The girls posing at the top of the hill - Tony said it is the

"Fernandez Angels"

We went river canoeing on the New River. The forecast was calling for 100% thunderstorms so we thought this would be a great time to be in a boat on the river. :) We were actually blessed to have fairly good weather and very little rain, luckily the forecasters were wrong about the 100% chance of storms. In fact, at one point, the sun peeked out of the clouds and we got a little warm. So, we were thankful for all the clouds.

The canoe trip was 5 miles down the river and usually takes people about 3 hrs. to do it. But, with all the rain it took us a little under 2 hrs. The river was nicely flowing which made paddling easy but their were some "rapids" and a lot of rocks that made the trip a little more "exciting." I have only been canoeing in calm lakes, ponds, and intercoastal waters but never on a river with "rapids" and rocks. With the water being higher, due to all the rain, a lot of the rocks were covered and you could not see how much clearance you had. So needless to say, Regan and I got stuck on one rock (really stuck - took alot of shifting our weight, paddling hard, and Tony coming alongside and pushing us - to get us off), hit another rock head on (we almost tipped over) and some more rocks sent us sideways and then backwards down some rapids. It was quite the adventure and made Regan never want to canoe with me again! :) Tony was getting quite a kick out of me and I am sure it would have made for good video footage if he did not have to paddle himself.

Tony had Reece and Riley with him.

Looks like Tony is making the girls do all the work...

Regan definitely let me do all the work in our canoe, you would have thought she learned her lesson of letting me paddle alone after our first encounter with some "rapids" - the ones that sent us backwards.

The end of our canoe trip led us to New River State Park.

We took a trip up to Grayson Highlands Park in Virginia and it was absolutely beautiful. The views reminded us of being out west (w/o cacti and desert of course) and there were wild horses roaming around.

This is one of the overlooks leading up to Grayson Highlands State Park.

The Rhododendron Gap Trail at Grayson Highlands.

Beautiful scenery...

We hiked about 3/4 mile and then came to an opening where wild horses were grazing. Although, they were not very wild because they would come right up to us and let us pet them.

This horse definitely needs a mane cut.

The horses were coming right up to the girls.

This horse seemed to love cameras and everytime I took a picture of him he would start coming toward me.

This horse wanted a back rub...

Here is a view of the Big Pinnacle at Grayson Highlands Park.

Hiking up to the Big Pinnacle. This trail was like a rain forest and we saw a snake while hiking on this trail. Regan was leading the way and just stopped right in front of it and matter-of-factly said, "a snake" very calmly. She just stood there looking at it (it was about 2 inches from her foot), I would have been long gone if I was her. We had to go around it because it was in the middle of the trail. Regan stepped calmly over it, Riley and Tony stepped around it and Reece and I forged our own new trail about 3 ft. away from it. (We were not sure what kind of snake it was but when we got home Regan looked it up in her snake pamphlet she has and we determined it must have been a brown snake.) Regan loves snakes so we put her in charge of being the leader the rest of the hike. :)

The view at the top of Big Pinnacle, 5,086 ft. elevation.

It was peaceful at the top and I would have loved to stay instead of having to go back down the "snake infested" trail. We only saw the one snake but I am sure the trail was full of them and they were just hiding under rocks watching us pass by.

Heading back down the steep trail...

The last day we visited Stone Mountain Park in NC. We hiked down some steep, wet rock and 327 stairs to get to this waterfall. It was very pretty but then we had to hike back up the 327 stairs and wet rock to get back up, that was not too fun especially in the hot, humid weather. We did not get to hike to the summit of Stone Mountain because it started to storm and the trail was about 3.5 miles roundtrip so it would have taken a long time. We will have to save that for another time.