Lisa & Bud Gould's Travel Blog

Sorry folks, but, this blog has been down for several days due to a change in hosting. Hopefully it will be OK in the future.

I was getting ready to post some pictures of our major project for the year - finishing the basement. I happened to be looking at someone else's pictures on Picasa, and realy liked the way they did albums. I opened an account (free) and did a little test run of uploading pictures. It turned out to be very simple - no resizing, cropping, or other things to make the pictures fit. So, I uploaded all of the basement pictures and add to them almost every day. Then I started putting stuff from ealier this year on it. As I get time, I will upload most of the pictures from the trips we have taken over the past few years. If you want to look at them - go to picasaweb.google.com/budgould

Well, here it is Friday already. My last work day for this trip. It's been a productive trip, but, glad it is over. The Odyssey is covered with about 1/8 inch layer of pollen from various trees in the area. I think it's bothering both of us as far as sinus drainage and sneezing goes. After work I'm going to find a car wash and try to get the worst of it off. Even the inside of the vehicle is covered with a thin yellow layer.
So, tomorrow we will head for Quantico, about 80 miles north or here, and visit the Museum of the Marine Corps. After that we will head to Manassas, about another 50 miles or so, to visit the Civil War battlefields there. We expect to get back on the road about mid-afternoon. We will be about 400 miles from Columbus so we will stay somewhere in between overnight and probably get to Columbus around noon on Sunday. Lisa will probably want to head for the large Asian Grocery store in downtown Columbus. Then, I'm pretty sure we will head for Dublin to visit Lawrence or to Hilliard to visit Lee or most likely both. Then we will only be a little over an hour from Dayton. So, we should be back home in Dayton on Sunday afternoon or evening.

Today is Tuesday morning and I'm a little late posting this.
Sunday was another very very nice day. Temps in the mid-70's and sunny. We toke a little trip to Colonial Williamsburg, mostly so Lisa could buy a case of honey roasted peanuts. After that we went to the James River State Park. A very nice park on the river with lots of hiking trails, canoes, kayaks, and boats. Also a nice little lake for bass fishing and paddling. We saw a pair of ospreys on their nest with either chicks or eggs, a very large black snake, and got close to a couple deer. We were going to stop at the New Kent Winery for a tour, but, they were all closed up because of Easter.
We still plan on heading home on Saturday morning. We may go to Quantico and Mananas to do a little touring of the Marine Corps museum and the Mananas battlefields from the Civil War. If we stop very long we will stay overnight somewhere between there and Columbus. Probably will visit Lee and Lawrence on the way home.

It has been a busy week at work. Lots of antenna array building, testing, re-configuration, more testing, and so on and on ... The weather was wet and rainy for a couple days, then it stopped raining, warmed up, and some moderate winds dried the fields out and made working there much better for the guys erecting the antennas and stringing the wire and cables.
No work this weekend so we went into Richmond to visit the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. It was a very beautiful day and we enjoyed several hours out in the sunshine. But, I must admit that both of us will pay for all that walking later when our knees reminds us to take it easy.
We are thinking of going to Williamsburg tomorrow and then maybe tour one of the wineries on either the James River or the Pamunkey River.

Well, I forgot to send my usual email to our kids and friends, telling them we were going on another trip to VA. After we got here a couple hours ago, I discovered that I had forgotten to transfer all of my email addresses to my new laptop computer. So, this is notification to all that we are in Richmond, VA, and will probably be here for about two weeks returning to Dayton around mid-April, probably the 11th or so.

The trip down here was pretty good. Mostly light rain until we hit the mountains in WV and then the rain got very heavy. Also a lot of dense fog in the Shenandoah valley. About an hour from Richmond it cleared up and the temps went from the low 40's to the low 60's degrees. We checked into the hotel (Hilton Garden Inn at the Richmond Airport) and then went out for supper.

My biggest problem is to try to recover my email addresses. I think I have a flash drive that I used to backup everything for the Texas trip in Jan/Feb of this year. Maybe I can restore that and communicate with everyone again. Problem is I will lose most of the stuff I saved from early Feb to now. Better than nothing I guess.