A weekend in the Blue Ridge

We left on Friday at noon under the kind of sky that can't decide whether to rain. By the time we got into the mountains it had decided, and the cabin's porch felt like exactly the right place to be. We didn't have a plan past Saturday.

On Saturday morning we drove twenty miles down a road we'd never seen before and stumbled into a bookstore that had no business being where it was — two stories, a black cat, a section of letterpress chapbooks, the whole thing smelling like cedar and coffee. We bought four books we didn't need and a postcard that we mailed to ourselves before we left town.

Sunday we took a long walk up to a ridge that we'd been told had a view. It did. We didn't take a photograph of it on purpose. Sometimes the look-and-leave is the whole point.

We drove home on the parkway with the windows down and stopped at every overlook. The trip back took us six hours that should've taken three. We don't regret it.