Arrival in Berryville

Last Saturday I drove to Berryville, Virginia to meet up with my father and his old friend H. and a bunch of other friends of H. H. is a monk and lives at a monastery. It is very pretty all around there. I drove across the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers. They were close to majestic in the brief time I saw them out the corner of my eyes while I was driving. After downshifting from highways to county routes, the views around me just got lovelier and lovelier.


The drive onto the monastery's land is long and beautiful. A great field of I don't know what with a smattering of yellow butterflies flitting from one stalk to another.
I hadn't been back to this place in years. I can't even begin to tell you when I might last have gone. It somehow was a place that always captured my imagination, or appealed to some deep part of my heart. Driving on a road and not being at all surprised to encounter a few cows in the middle of the road. The teeth rattling bump, bump, bump of the cow guard on my car's tires. It was all so familiar and invoked a sense of nostalgia as well as, well, something close to wonder. It's just so pretty.
I took a million photographs so I'm rolling them out slowly. This was the drive to the guest house/old farm house where H.'s guests stayed.