Family Vacation 2011 – Day 2
After a strange (not not unusual) night which resulted with all 4 of us sleeping together, I woke up with the roosters at 4:30am, unable to return to sleep. I learned a few things about roosters that morning: they don’t just crow once and be done with it; They continue to do so. A lot. So me and the roosters chilled out and played games on my phone for a couple hours. Welcome to the first full day of vacation!
About 6 I crawled back into bed with the fam, and Andrew was starting to wake up. By 6:30 we had woken up the rest of the house, and it was as comical as it was sad. Not everyone are early birds like us, but our gracious hosts laughed with us, put on the coffee, and took us out back to greet the chickens… who were still asleep. This was a first at the Murphy home: Waking up before the chickens. We stood outside the roost, beckoning them out, but had no takers for several minutes. Finally one brave chicken came out to be chased by Andrew, and the rest followed.
This was the first of many blessings of the day and has convinced me that the best way to spend vacation, if at all possible, is with friends. We easily could have picked a destination with a hotel for a night on the way to break up the trip, but instead we had this self-contained mini-adventure which took us into parts of Lynchburg that will not show up on any website or advertisement. But it was places where people are living their lives, sharing, and in community together; Where the Spirit reigns instead of touristy consumerism and entertainment.
After feeding the chickens and a pancake breakfast, we followed Carolyn over to her brother’s home, and visited with him and their friends Anita, Drew & fam, who we had met once before when they visited Maine. Another trip led us to a place where Kyle is building a home, log-cabin style. He is still “timberframing” if I recall the word correctly, and the project is true to the vision. As Care led us around the area, she put it this way: “Our faith has been shaped by the restoration of things which have been abused or broken.”
{If you only read that quote once, you’ll need to stop and go back.}
And so they build a home on a stretch of land which has been abandoned and dormant for years, while others look for the latest in real-estate development zones. They cherish community and life together where others build fences.
As we walked around the area, we stumbled across a group of half-a-dozen goats, pictured above with Andrew.
With that, we had to gather up the children and hit the road. Another 5 or 6 hours of driving awaited us, but it was another uneventful drive and we checked into our condo just outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina by 5pm. We unpacked, completed an initial review of the playground, and settled in for the night, exhausted, but glad for the journey so far and looking forward to the day ahead.