Family Reunion/Vacation With the Boys

Another wonderful family reunion

Lots of good food! Happy family members! More good food! Swimming! Fishing! A little rain. More good food! A get-together at the house to roast weenies and make s’mores.

Pauline, Missy and Judy

Mikey Mike, Pat & Louise

Joshua and Tony in the pool

Mike, Mikey, Pat, Aaron and John

My Uncle Pat and me with our "Murphy's Bar" t-shirts I brought from Ireland.

We plan our vacation around the family reunion so we can bring our grandsons, Tony & Josh, with us for a week. They love being in WV. They remembered the reunion at Audra Park last year and walking the trail around the park. They talked us into doing that on Sunday afternoon after everyone had left. Little did I know! It was hot and humid and little did I know that the trail was miles long. It took over 2 hours to walk it. Along the way, we stopped and took a dip in the river. When we started out again, Joshua ran into a yellow jacket nest and was stung three times; Tony was stung twice and Glenn once. Kinda put a damper on the hike. Some interesting sites along the way:

Doesn't it look like this tree just sat down to take a rest?

The boys had seen a show on tv about the Mothman of Point Pleasant. And I had seen a show on Food network about Hillbilly Hot Dogs in Lesage. So, I told them I’d take them to Point Pleasant to see the statue of the Mothman, but on the way we’d stop at Hillbilly Hotdogs. I didn’t know it was 3 ½ hours away! The boys didn’t know what to expect when we pulled into the hot dog place. Joshua’s words were “this is quite unexpected.”

The outside of Hillbilly Hotdogs.

This is the attached bus that served as the seating area.

On the counter inside was a marker and everyone (and I mean everyone) wrote their name somewhere. Here's where Joshua and Tony wrote theirs (Joshua's is down by his right hand on the wooden bar):
After getting a corn dog and plain weenie, we were off to Point Pleasant. What a lovely little town right on the Ohio River. And everyone was so nice. We saw the Mothman statue and went to the Mothman Museum and the River Museum and walked down by the river. By the river there is a flood wall with murals painted on the river side depicting some battle between Chief Constalk and Gen. Andrew Lewis. There were even statues of them. We even got to see the artist painting a section.

Glenn and I took the boys on a four-hour train ride from Elkins on the New Tygart Flyer. We went to the top of Cheat Mt. Along the way we had a great buffet lunch. At the top of the mountain, the train stopped and everyone got out to look at the falls of cheat. Then we started back down the mountain. For some reason, the generator on the train stopped working and we had no lights or a/c. It got over 80 degrees in the cars. Someone got the bright idea to open the door between the trains to let some air in, but all we got was diesel fumes and the doors were quickly closed. All in all, a very nice trip.
On the last day of our vacation, we went to my niece’s for a crawdad boil. Frank and Vicki did a great job. Even Tony tried them. For those of us who didn’t eat crawdads, Vicki made some great lasagna.