Day Six - Family Time

Rehashing some of the must-see local areas while visiting family

Dec 09, 2024

An outline of the current post & the direction of the blog:

Hello everyone, and as always, thank you for taking a little slice of time out of your day to read this blog (or scroll through the pictures). Now, I hope you all have enjoyed your Sunday. This blog will be updated daily until the end of the memories from our trip, except for Sundays or holidays so I have time to pre-write these posts, each taking roughly an hour to an hour and a half to write. I considered making the following post into a double post with day #5 as we revisit some familiar places with nothing more than an added level of depth to some of the places that we visited on this day. Ultimately, I decided against it, as the point of this blog isn’t to create the most visually appealing, interesting, or fairytale-like versions of everything that happened. The point of this blog is to provide an accurate catalog of everything that we have experienced, even if it is repetitive or boring.

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Too many people spend too much of their lives performing for their few hundred, or a few thousand Instagram followers, I want this blog to serve as a revolt against this concept. Rather than the blog being on our minds while we traveled, and the creation of a clean, powerful, or beautiful, image for the blog, we lived our lives first and made the blog after, without it factoring into our decision-making. The unfortunate piece of this approach is that some days aren’t as interesting. When you are living, and not projecting an image to the world, there are down days, less eventful days, and days where you sacrifice what you want to do to make someone else happy. With that being said, I will always try to make these posts as interesting as possible for the reader whilst remaining authentic to what happened and telling the story in its entirety.

Above is a picture of Elias and Colin at a West Virginia truck stop from day 2.

Family

The first of many visits to relatives across the nation.

Our trip was only possible because of the kindness of people that we came into contact with. While some strangers acted incredibly kind as our story unfolded, family routinely showed up for all of us whenever we needed it. It could be as simple as giving us a roof over our heads, a warm meal, quality time with a familiar face, etc. Whenever we asked, our families delivered. The first visit that we would make to visit family would be Dylan’s sister in Northern Virginia.

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First off, I would like to thank Dylan’s sister Stacey for her incredible kindness in taking us in that night, as well as purchasing us all pizza, and taking us around. We woke up that morning without a plan for the upcoming day for the first time in our whole trip. We knew that we wanted to head somewhere south and visit the State House in Richmond while it was open so we could tour around the building, but other than that, there was no plan. With essentially a full day on our hands, we left it up to Dylan and his sister to make our plans for this day. They decided to visit more of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC.

The weather that day was clear, hot, and humid, with rain, or at least a significant chance of rain forecasted for the next week for where we were in Northern Virginia. With some good, clear weather, we piled into Stacey’s car and got ready to go to Washington DC once more.

Washington DC

Another few museums from our nation’s capital city

I’ll make this part quick since you’ve already read about us being in Washington DC before. Here are a few pictures from the museums that we visited.

After touring through the museums, we walked outside and the hungriest of us purchased food from the many food trucks that line the streets in DC. But we had been spending a lot of time in DC, with rain on the way, and wanting to make it back to Richmond with time to still look inside the State Capitol, we started our trip back to Northern Virginia.

After getting back to Stacey’s apartment in Virginia, we climbed up the staircases to grab our belongings and pack the van back up. The packing process was brief, taking only one trip down the stairs to gather up all of our belongings. We all thanked Stacey for her generosity, and Dylan spent some extra time with his sister before going back on the road again. This was likely because Dylan knew that this would be his last chance to see his sister for the upcoming months. After the final goodbyes were said, we got back on the road!

Above is a picture of Dylan with his sister, Stacey

Virginia State Capitol

This time, we were able to go into the State Capitol

When we first visited the State Capitol grounds the day prior, we absolutely knew that we needed to come back and tour the inside of the building. I know that a blog post about the same two places that we visited the day before isn’t the most interesting thing in the world, so I will be brief again. (Writers note: this won’t happen again on the trip, we happily decided to stay in the general area so Dylan could meet with his sister.)

Above is a portrait of First President and Virginia native George Washington.

Above is a ceremonial mace that is still in use to this day for the House of Delegates in Virginia.

Above is a picture of the architecture inside the building.

Above are pictures from inside the State Capitol, showing the long, storied history of Virgina.

Above is a bust of Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia native.

End of the Day

Escaping the weather, and making progress down south

After looking at the forecast earlier and seeing nothing but rain, and having not made much progress either out West or South since arriving in the Virginia area, we knew that it was time to hit the road. Now, it was almost certainly going to rain that night so we set our sights on an ambitious target. We chose to head to a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, to visit my cousin once removed in North Carolina. starting our drive down south, we texted him, asking if we could use his house to stay the night. He had graciously offered up his home to us, making it clear that we were more than welcome to use his house as a place to stay the night before we left for the trip. After he said that he would be more than happy to let us stay there, we became far more excited, knowing that we wouldn’t have to drive further out west to a campground, and then get rained on. If it weren’t for Adam, we would’ve been in a far, far worse situation that night. Thank you doesn’t go far enough to describe how grateful we were for his hospitality.

After spending a few days in cities, we were all ready for the long drive into the Charlotte metro area which would serve as our launching point into the wilderness of North Carolina. The long drive was tiring for all of us, as our car finally pulled into his driveway at around 10 pm. We got into his house, set up our sleeping gear, and finally got some sleep.

Above is a map of the drive that we took that day with NH in view, with the black box covering up Stacey’s address

A closer view of the drive that we took

Above is a map of the distance as the crow flies from Mary Anne’s in downtown Derry to where we spent the night.

A Thank You

Lastly, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, thank you very much for reading. If you like reading my posts, I would encourage everyone to make a substack account and to download the substack app. As we start to move out south and west, these posts will become progressively longer, meaning that they won’t be able to fit fully into your email. Now, you will still receive an email when the blog is posted, but if you don’t use the app or an internet browser, you will miss out on some of the pictures and stories. Thank you all for reading, please like the post if you like what you’ve been seeing, and comment on your thoughts from this post. Thank you!