Natural Bridge.

Last week, we spent a day at Natural Bridge. The first time that my parents took me there, I was somewhere between one and two years old. They took me and my brother back several more times while we were growing up, and I know we visited on a couple of school field trips, too, but it's probably been six or seven years since the last time we went. This time we went specifically to see the wax museum one more time, because sadly, it's closing after Labor Day.

We started off the day by seeing the bridge itself and walking the short trail to the waterfall at the end. It was a little warm and humid (this is August in Virginia, after all), but the path is shaded. It was such a nice walk, with the creek trickling along on one side and the mossy stone wall and trees on the other. And I never get tired of seeing the bridge...it's so massive and beautiful! (To give you an idea, in the picture of me with the bridge, those orange things to the right of my head are large traffic cones under the bridge. And the red and white spots to the right of the cones are people standing closer to the bridge than I was, but still not directly under it.)

{Me and Dad were proud of my mom for walking the whole trail! It was at least a mile and a half, which is the furthest she's walked at one time since her accident.}

Then we went to the wax museum. It's not a fancy, big budget museum by any means...it's small and quirky and a bit creepy at times, but that's why I love it. :) It's probably the exact same now that it was thirty years ago. There are lots of historical scenes set up with wax figures, most of them focused in Virginia (but not all). I remember being slightly intimidated by the museum as a kid...there was a fake bobcat set high on the wall around one corner, and when you walked under it lit up and hollered out. Also, there are wax tourists leaning against the barriers, looking at exhibits, and I remember always being nervous that I would mistake a real person for a wax one, or vice versa. :) The pictures above are: some guy (whose name escapes me) who killed several hundred bears during his lifetime and lived to be in his 90s (he died from stepping on a rusty nail, which is a rather anticlimactic way for a bear hunter to go, I suppose), the surrender at Appomattox, a section of the hall of presidents, Laurel and Hardy, The Last Supper (a short presentation about Jesus that serves as the finale of the museum), and a bit of the wax figure factory in the basement. All of the figures are very realistic looking, though some of them that are based on real people are more accurate than others.

Going through the museum was bittersweet knowing that this would be the last time I'd get to experience this piece of my childhood. I'm really glad we got to see it again before it closes, though. (There are also lovely caverns at Natural Bridge, but we skipped those on this visit.)

Afterwards we had lunch at the Pink Cadillac Diner, which is where we always stop when we go to Natural Bridge. It's a wonderfully tacky little place, where you can eat an Elvis burger while studying the hundreds (thousands?) of old pictures and bits of memorabilia hanging on the walls: classic movie posters, lots of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart, vinyl records, etc. On the way home, Dad had to stop at the feed mill for chicken feed, so I ran into the local yarn store there (probably the closest real yarn store to me, though it's still not exactly nearby).

Gorgeous new yarn...the perfect way to end the day! The orange is much darker and subtle in real life, and it's Madelinetosh, which is my one weakness. (Ha.) The purple and teal (it's really the most perfect dark teal, despite how bland it looks in the photo) are Cascade 220 sport and fingering weights.