Last night, Connor, Mario, and I all hiked it up to our friend Donald's mountain house, named 'Little Wildway' in Appomattox, VA, about two hours away. His family had just recently bought the property and we were taking this opportunity to spend the night out in the boondocks away from our lives in the city, just four friends and nature. Cold, cold nature. It was fucking freezing out there, and the elevation didn't help. What we ended up appreciating most was just how warm the indoors could be.
The inside of the cottage was cozy and small. The interior design was pretty decent for the budget it must have been built with, featuring a lot of genuine wood and stone work.
Don and I worked on getting a fire started first thing. A shit load of leaves and a tissue box later, we succeeded. Unfortunately, two of the three flues were broken and the house began to fill up with smoke and ash. You can see how bad it was getting in this picture. After putting out the fire, we decided to eat and watch some Hayao Myazaki on my laptop. Howl's Moving Castle was a lot longer than I remembered.
Before leaving the next morning, we decided to take a walk around the grounds which had been too dark the previous night to really appreciate. I mean dark. Without any light pollution for miles and trees this dense, you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you.
We first walked over to what used to be the horse barn. The feeding trowel had been rained in and then frozen over, but the ice sheet on top was only about two inches deep. Just below the sheet, you could still see a few waterbugs swimming in what looked like slow motion. If you lived in 33° water you wouldn't exactly be booking it either.
A little past the barn was a tiny creek. It was babbling. I didn't get pictures of it but we also visited a neat little pet cemetery.
It was about that time that we realized we'd had enough of the cold and decided to finally leave for good old Richmond again. We listen to some Dilated Peoples and Black Star on the trip back. I took a good nap.
