June 6th

Saturday night we got packed up and pretty much ready to go.
This is when butch shoved a picnic table in front of me when i was on my bike and i hurt myself.  Okay, so the picnic table was concreted into the ground and butch was all the way at the back of the beast putting his bike on the bike rack, and i had a stupid idea, and then he laughed really long at the outcome of my idea.
(see a couple of posts ago)

Sunday morning we headed out to do the sewer dump thing and get over to the visitor center by 9am.  We were going on a tour of Camp Rapidan. Feel free to look it up for the long story.  The short story is that when they created Shenandoah National Park, President Hoover bought a parcel of land and created what was a presidential retreat.  It was where he could escape the rat race of DC and where he thought he could actually get some work done.  Too bad this was during the depression and all of this was perceived by newspapers and people as not caring about the country.  Well, that and the fact that he thought that government couldn't get the country out of the depression that it would take private industry to make that change.  Sounds a lot like the idiots of today-maybe they should read their history and find out that it wasn't until FDR and his "alphabet soup" of government programs to get change started.  Then of course the war came on and that pulled the country out of the mess Coolidge had gotten us into.  Sorry, history and politics-the two things that get me jumping.

Anyway, we got on a bus that the NPS referred to as the Hoover Mover down to Camp Rapidan.  The ranger that led the tour had a history masters degree and was tremendously knowledgeable up until someone asked him who Hoover's vice president was...he got a bit offended.  it took us 30 minutes to drive 6.4 miles.  The road, she wasn't the best, and was all hairpin turns down the side of the mountain.

There was not much left of the camp as it had later been turned into a boy scout camp and had been abandoned for a good bit.  The cabin that was the Hoovers was named the Brown House tongue in cheek with the other color house they lived.

This is the view from Pres. Hoovers private trout stream up to the back of the Brown House.

This fireplace was built for photo op's.  Notice it is outside, and nothing around it.  They'd put two chairs out by a roaring fire, and let the photogs in for some very controlled pictures.

It was about a 3 hour tour, (no Gilligan) and we headed on home after having some lunch. Always seems to rain on the way home.