Today’s post is the third and final of the Hawksbill Cabin 2010 retrospective. We’ll review the posts from September 2010 to December in this one.
September 2010 – Besides the end of my grand experiment with container gardens (Mary’s containers were still producing tomatoes on into October), we took a wonderful short vacation on Cape Cod. We enjoyed meeting up with another Berlin friend, John, while we were there, and have vowed to go back from time to time. One other major highlight during September was my hiking group’s “expedition” to West Virginia, where we finally did our introductory Dolly Sods Wilderness hike.
We selected this destination after repeated and emphatic recommendations from Howard at AOA that the Sods is a “must do.” Thanks to him and also to Gary for some advice on gear must haves. The group was itching for a hike in overnighter…but since this was going to be a first effort at this distance from home, with a long route, and other new complexity, I convinced them to make it into more of an endurance shake down.
We booked rooms at the state park lodge there, and shuttled over to the trailhead. Our hike went well, a bit longer than most of the ones we had undertaken to date, like the Jones Run Doyle River route in the spring or Duncan Know last year. The group enjoyed the scenery – it is everything that the reviews (and Howard) promised – and I think we all enjoyed the rigor of this hike. Sightseeing the next day – Blackwater Falls and Seneca Rocks – convinced us that we’ll have to try it again soon.
October 2010 – The seasons transitioned into fall, and the Farmers’ Market came to an end for the year. We picked up some winter squash at the last market – I’ve made curried squash soup, and a sausage stuffed acorn squash dish so far with these – along with a couple of briskets. I roasted one in the oven; the second is destined for the smoker later this winter.
During October we also enjoyed a couple of fall visits to Wisteria Vineyards with friends, the Page County Heritage Festival, and Mary and I returned to Seneca Rocks in West Virginia for a day trip – all good stuff that kept our minds off the saturation coverage of the pending elections in November.
November 2010 – We took a business trip to Lynchburg to start the month – this time as part of Mary’s faculty job at the University of Maryland. We saw an inspirational adaptive reuse/historic preservation project there, which resulted in the development of the Craddock Terry Hotel.
I say the visit was inspirational because after talking with the development team there, I had some new ideas about the Jordan Hollow Inn, which had foreclosed earlier in the year. We’d taken a look at the property as a potential investment back in March (thanks to Tom, Kelly, and Anthony for the architectural and engineering review!), and with the new information decided to take another look. The timing is just not right for us on this one – we hope the right owner comes along eventually with a successful approach.
December 2010 – As I am writing and posting this, the month’s not quite over. Some highlights include the beginning, and major progress, on our Alexandria kitchen remodel. There’ll be more to come on this one, of course. Also, I transitioned to an iPhone after losing my Moto RAZR early this month, and that is going to mean some changes to the blog in the coming months (hint: the minibogs video I posted gives an idea of the new capabilities that are coming online for humble bloggers such as myself).
The big news coming out of Page County as the year winds down are the announcement of changes at the EDA, and the news that the long-planned data center may be just getting ready to launch. The value of the past EDA chairman’s long tenure can’t be forgotten, even if one doesn’t agree with everything the organization has done over the last few years, but the change will be a good thing. As far as the data center goes, I’ve been around these projects enough to know they carry great risk – on the one hand, that is what entrepreneurs do, to take risks – but on the other, I do worry that there could be longer-term negative impacts to the economy of the County, whether this project succeeds, and especially if it fails.
Maybe the result of all this will be a revisited, revamped, strategic plan for economic growth in Page County. I’d like to see that – and I hope the posts here, when I turn to that topic, have helped foster and will contribute to clarifying that new direction.
Closing out the year, I’d like to say that we get a strong sense of community here. The contributions we made as part of the Fibrowatt efforts was very rewarding, not to mention the new friendships that resulted from that endeavor. We have great neighbors that we enjoy getting together with when we can, and there are good friends in town among the businesses there. So I end the year with thoughts of wanting to find other contributions to make to this community – finding a way that we can help make it a better place. I hope the blog is a small part of that.
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