On our trip to Skyline Drive we had driven through a quaint looking town called Gordonsville. So, for a day out alone, Francine and I thought we’d go and investigate. Our return route could take us by Lake Anna which, though very large being a dammed lake, had many smallish sidearms that could prove interesting.

We found street parking and abandoned ship to wander up and down the main street; there really was just one street which suits me fine. At the end was a BBQ shack which could have been interesting but our attention was drawn to the Well Hung Vineyard restaurant. We had passed this establishment on the way up the main drag. It was:

Founded in 2008 by three women who recognized the value of a good joke and a great glass of wine …

It hadn’t looked very active at first but now we saw that there was a small marquee on the side which clearly was active. We couldn’t resist and went in.

The menu presented us with a relatively easy choice; Blackened Shrimp Cobb Salad was on offer and we both chose the same thing. The glass of wine was similarly easy since their list contained a Viognier, which is our favourite white grape. The “cobb salad” wasn’t quite what we expected, being composed of mixed leaves but, with the addition of egg, tomatoes, guacamole, bacon and cucumber as well, of course, the spicy blackened shrimp, it hit the spot.

While we digested our lunch we drove off towards Lake Anna. We found a boat ramp with parking which had some vegetation at the margins so we pulled in to investigate.

Bingo! We soon spotted some dragonfly activity in the sunshine. The dragonfly was the same that we’d found a few days earlier but, as a couple turned up to launch a boat also intent on enjoying the sunshine, we found a couple of damselflies both of which were new to me. Both were cousins of our own Common Blue Damselfy (Ischnura elegans). With the help of iNaturalist, I later managed to identify these as the Eastern Forktail (Ischnura verticalis) and, with the broken antehumeral stripes, the delightful Fragile Forktail (Ischnura posita). The Ischnura genus damselflies are known as Forktails in the States.

Happy camper again.

[The first of our two scheduled scary days in the US. The second is likely to be even scarier. Watch this space.]

One potential benefit that I saw about making a trip to Richmond, Virginia, at this time of year was that I’d be avoiding one of my greatest hates, Halloween. This trip has made me refine my definition in that it isn’t actually Halloween that I hate – I give Halloween absolutely no thought at all – but it’s that dreadful import from America of Trick or Treat.

[A few years ago I was heartened to see that Spain is putting up staunch resistance to the importation of an American festival, too, when they have traditional festivals of their own.]

I was a little surprised, therefore, when we were told that there was to be a Halloween party in this large retirement community and that we were expected to attend. Attending was one thing but we were to dress up, along with everyone else. The only children here are those that are 60+.

We are living as guests in  a large complex, pretty much a village in itself, run by Erickson Senior Living. It really is an impressively organized gated community with security and other staff, all of whom appear to enjoy their work. There are several interlinked blocks, some still being built, with several restaurants, a bar, and recreational areas. Such a place could quite easily feel institutionalized but happily it doesn’t. Many of the residents, which we refer to tongue-in-cheek as inmates, seem to eat in the restaurants almost every day. The apartments all have well equipped kitchens but I get the feeling that many of these are hardly ever used. We have eaten in a few of the restaurants several times and the food is excellent.

The afternoon began with a fancy-dress staff parade to the accompaniment of music. The inmates, also mostly in fancy dress, stood around applauding. Prizes in a few categories were awarded for the staff costumes.

For my sins, my wardrobe lady dressed me in medical scrubs as a surgeon. My neck was adorned with a toy stethoscope for added authenticity. Most people were also wearing masks – I tried a batman mask but it both seemed less than appropriate and felt uncomfortable, being made for a child, so I discarded that.

Later in the afternoon, many inmates gathered inside for a bit of costumed dancing. I was having a hard time believing what I was seeing. More prizes for costumes were awarded in more categories.

My surgeon outfit must have been a success because I was asked, “when are you operating”, all by ladies, on several occasions. I told them, “whenever you are ready” and advised them to mark the bits they’d like removed, lest they lost anything they actually still needed. I could have made quite a bit of money.

Eventually sanity was restored.

After a traditionally leisurely start, we were driven out west about 90 minutes away to visit Skyline Drive.

Skyline Drive is a picturesque road at very nearly 3000 feet altitude] running north-south for 105 miles along a ridge in the Shenandoah National Park. For comparison, Scafell Pike is England’s highest peak at about 3200 feet/980 metres. The main idea was to see the fall colours of the trees. We joined at Swift Run Gap and turned south.

As is often the case, nature had other ideas; most of the leaves had fallen so much of the colour had gone. It did leave some impressive views down into the Shenandoah River valley, though. At this stop we were inundated with ladybirds, or ladybugs as they are called over here. The term bug  seems inappropriate to me in that these are beetles and not bugs. On the other hand, they aren’t birds either so I shouldn’t complain about this particular piece of American terminology.

The ladybirds kept landing on us in various places. One girl also at the overlook ran away into her car ‘cos she couldn’t stand the ladybirds crawling all over her. When we returned to our car to continue our journey, several ladybirds hitchhiked with us and were now crawling all over the inside of the car. In the back seat, we rescued those that we could.

We made another stop at Loft Mountain Wayside for a picnic in the splendid sunshine. We were continuing to benefit from what is somewhat unseasonable excellent weather. I can’t believe the luck we’ve had with the weather this year following almost six weeks mostly of sun in Spain.

After our picnic we completed the drive to the Rockfish Gap Entrance Station where we clambered onto the I64 to head head east back towards Richmond. The interstate is pretty much lined with trees on both sides all the way and these, at least, did put on a show of some autumn colours.

The Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden was another potentially interesting habitat that I spotted on Google maps. I saw that it had a couple of lakes/ponds and popped into iNaturalist to find that it had a number of dragonfly records. Botanic gardens are usually a good source and this looked like being no exception.

We allowed the day to warm up a little, to about 20°C, which it did by midday. Overnight temperatures have been hovering around 10°C. We are, of course, having to get used to American forecasts in good ol’ °F. I’m better (always have been) with °F at the warm end of the scale than at the cooler end. I know/remember that 70°F is quite pleasant but 48°F, for example, needs more thinking about. I once experienced Chicago at 0°F, which really needs some brain work… and avoiding.

After a 30-minute drive we arrived in a car park and were confronted by the “E. Claiborne Robins Visitors Center”,  which made me question whether we were actually in the correct place; nothing appeared to mention Lewis Ginter. All was well, this is where we should be and, on trust, we got old-wrinkly concession rates of $15 each (down from $20).

The botanical garden is, as one might expect in the US, very well presented. In front of you as you enter is a very imposing conservatory reminiscent of the glasshouses of Kew Gardens. To the right are the two lakes/ponds with well vegetated margins. Long story short: we walked around most of the water but I didn’t see a hint of any dragonflies.

What did hold my attention for a long time, was a flower bed with a large clump of “Cushion Mums” (so the label said) which Francine referred to as Asters (who am I to argue?). This dense patch of a food source was absolutely heaving with all manner of flying critters.

The largest of the feeding insects was a quite striking butterfly. For most of the time all I could catch was the underside showing while it moved about with mostly closed wings, frustrating little beasts that they are. Eventually, though, it positioned itself advantageously and I got the spectacular topside. Naturally this is quite a common butterfly around here, the Common Buckeye (Junonia coenia).

Also representing the Lepidoptera were a number of skipper butterflies. For these, since there are a number of confusing species and not having an American reference book, I will have to resort to iNaturalist for some identifications. Though I do have some ideas, I’ll need confirmation or correction from someone with local knowledge.

Naturally, hoverflies were well represented. Hoverflies are quite descriptively known as Flower flies in the United States. Again, these are going to require some local knowledge to sort out.

What I was completely captivated by and what I did manage to identify, Google lens pointing me in the right direction, was this endearing, colourful little moth; apparently one of the ermine moths, called the Ailanthus webworm (Atteva aurea). I have never seen the like of it before and what a great addition to my catalogue.

Given the extraordinary weather that we are enjoying – forecasters are talking about almost record temperatures for the season – I’m clearly a bit too late for any dragonflies, though there really should be some left if I could but find the right environment. Still, this fine collection from the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden is very welcome indeed.

A first attempt at a brush with nature and a solo excursion. Our hostess had appointment with her doc mid afternoon so I had rooted around on iNaturalist looking for potential dragonfly sites in the vicinity.I found a park and recreation area called Deep Run about 20 minutes away by car..

We are drawing very close to the end of the flight season so options, if they existed at all, would be very limited but you never know. There had been a sighting of a darter, which is a late season genus so we set out with fingers crossed. If all else failed, it looked like a pleasant enough environment just for a wander.

The park has two modestly sized lakes. Each has a fountain in the middle, which is a less than great sign but there did appear to be some margins that could prove of interest.

We wandered around both lakes and found nothing. There didn’t even seem to be any other flying critters in the sunlit vegetation, which I thought strange.

There was a wooden observation deck with some sunny seating covered by a wooden roof and surrounded by some trees. Whilst there might have been no insects, it didn’t take long before birdlife came to my rescue. Some previous visitor had scattered seed along a wooden handrail beneath the trees and these were being visited by a chickadee (like our tits) and what was clearly some form of nuthatch.

It took me a while with the fast-moving nuthatch but I got a few shots on the handrail. It isn’t exactly a typical nuthatch pose, though, and every now and then it behaved more typically by hanging head-down on a tree trunk. Eventually I was happier. Without reference books, resorting to Google Lens (best avoided in the UK being America-centric), this proved to be a White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis).

The chickadee was more complicated, there being two very similar options: Black-capped Chickadee and Carolina Chickadee. There are very few places where their ranges overlap but, of course, this is one location where they do..My suspicion is that our suspect is most likely the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) – it’s common in Virginia and has less white on the wings, allegedly.

I was a little surprised that the numerous Grey Squirrels – at least they are native here and not an invasive species – were not setting about vacuuming up the birdseed; they certainly would have been in the UK.

Wearing my trusty brimmed Tilley hat, any overhead vision is cut off by the brim but Francine spotted a whole load of what were obviously now uninhabited insect nests in the roof over our seating area. “They look like organ pipes”, she remarked. Obviously someone else had thought the same; these are the distinctive nesting tubes” of a wasp aptly called the Organ Pipe Mud Dauber (Trypoxylon politum).

Wandering further we found a sheltered hedgerow basking in the later afternoon sun. While I was trying to catch a difficult-to-identify black wasp-like insect (maybe an ichneumon of some kind), at long last a dragonfly turned up and flew back and forth along the hedge, sadly without settling. It was clearly one of what the Americans call a Darner, or Hawker in our terms, but I’ll never know which.

Nonetheless, I had a modest collection of additions to my catalogue, albeit not what I was primarily after.

This was also a jetlag reunion. There’s a 5-hour time difference (normally) between the east coast of the States and the UK. I say “normally” because we had cleverly arranged to arrive in Washington DC on the night that the UK changed its clocks back to GMT from BST. The States, however, changes its clocks next weekend. Thus, we hit the sack five hours adrift and woke up (after eventually getting to sleep) four hours adrift. Great stuff.

Understanding nothing of clock changes (in common with yours truly) our body clocks, of course, were working on five hours adrift. As expected, we awoke early. I had originally thought of returning to the airport for our rental car at 10:00 but there seemed little point hanging around twiddling our thumbs so we went down for an unscintillating breakfast before boarding the 09:00 shuttle bus to the airport.

a couple of things:

1. When it’s operating, the shuttle bus runs to the airport every hour on the hour. Though the arriving guest instructions are to phone for a ride, I do not believe the bus departs any time in between the hours, which would explain why we had trouble getting a ride last night.
2. A poster in the hotel elevator spoke of “our carefully curated breakfast”. What on earth is a curated breakfast – it sounds like something out of a museum? (I really must look that word up.) Since the protein content consisted of slices of turkey sausage and indifferent scrambled eggs, I think a museum might be appropriate. (The eggs were improved by the addition of some Tabasco sauce.)

The shuttle bus returned from its 08:00 airport run. We sat waiting nearby for the 09:00 run, along with our new friendly passenger in distress from last night.

We got to the airport, disembarked the hotel shuttle and embarked on the Hertz car rental shuttle. All was well with our reservation. Since I detest renting vehicle, I’m now in the habit of taking the full insurances. I did so again. After Darwin knows how many additional charges were also added to the bill, having previously “paid for” the car using Francine’s airmiles, we still ended up with a thumping $1200+ charge for the 2-week rental. ”Welcome to America|”, said the lady. Indeed.

I was curious about toll charges. On my previous visits I’d been used to tossing coins into a basket at a toll booth. Happily now the car has an electronic tag, similar to those we now use in France and Spain, so it should be automated, though our lady thought we wouldn’t incur any charges. We’ll see. That gets sorted when we return.

We went and found our Ford Explorer, an upgrade from what we thought we’d ordered. Clambering in to an unfamiliar car and staring at its controls is always exciting though, this being a Ford, I had some clues from good ol’ Frodo.

Francine had invested in an Holafly e-sim so that we’d be able to navigate using good ol’ Google Maps. That fired up well, too – we were on a roll. Francine connected it to the Explorer’s USB socket and lo, our route appeared on the car’s screen. Brilliant stuff. We had no idea which route Google had chosen – it had three options when I tried at home before departing – but we were off.

Most routes involve heading south on the I95 from some point and that’s where we finally ended up. After 70 miles or so, turn onto the I295 across the top of Richmond and we’re getting close. A sign to a Starbucks grabbed my attention and, close to our destination, we paused to relax with a coffee before descending on our friend.

I had driven one of the routes between Washington Dulles and Richmond many years ago before the days of GPS and navigation systems. Once you get to the I95 it’s a doddle but getting from the airport to the I95 is more complex. I honestly cannot remember how I did it without a passenger to read a map.

Our final destination was a retirement community with a security guard on a barrier. She logged us in and presented us with a visitor pass so we could come and go for the duration. It’s an enormous retirement community; finding our way in, having parked in a “visitor” slot as instructed, proved problematic. A nice lady with a barky dog helped us. In return or some fuss, her dog stopped barking,

Approaching the apartment, we were met by an open door. Reunions ensued which did of course, require hugs, beer and wine.

For the first time in countless years, we’re off to the States for a couple of weeks. We are going to get reacquainted with the wife of an old, late lamented friend and colleague from my software development days. He was the project manager at the customer of my software company and we formed a close friendship  He sadly passed away four years ago at the beginning of Covid, though Covid was not quoted as the reason. [We remain unconvinced.] Finding a mutually convenient slot in the calendars is a trick but we did.

Our final destination is Richmond, VA. Francine had an accumulation of American Airlines airmiles from her business days and managed to use the bulk of those [we’re glad to get them used up] to book a BA flight in Premium Economy [whoops, current name: World Traveller Plus]. That was timetabled to land at Dulles International at 20:30 – too late to consider a 2½-hr drive down to Richmond – so we chose an airport hotel [airmiles again] followed by a rental car [also airmiles] to drive down the following day.

Travelling to the States is quite different now from our last experiences. You now have to complete an online ESTA application [Electronic System for Travel Authorization] as opposed to the old Visa Waiver. That went well and it looked like they’d let us in.

Being a BA flight, we were departing from Terminal 5, a new experience for me.  Since booking my car parking, some local genius has caused Heathrow car parks to suffer what is, in my view, a completely pointless name change: Long Term Parking is now Park & Ride whilst Business Parking is Park & Ride Plus (or is it “+”?) The net effect is that the car parks are exactly the same but the road signs are all now out of date. What on earth is the point of that? T5 Park & Ride was very busy with just a few scattered spaces that took some finding. We did find one at the extreme end of the area and boarded a transfer bus, whose driver kindly waited for us a moment or two.

Automated check-in and bag drop was successful after we found a friendly warm body to help us out after the bag check machine ran out of paper half way through processing my bag. I commented that I preferred warm bodies and she replied that they’d rather be the warm bodied checking us in, too.

Carrying absolutely nothing metal – I’d even taken off my walking boots –  I set off the security scanner. After that, the “beam me up, Scotty” machine refused to scan me, so I had to have the magic wand waved over my limbs manually. My boots eventually reappeared having taken a wrong automated turn and I could re-dress.

We whiled away the time in T5 Weatherspoons. At £5,.50 a pint, it was unlike any other Weatherspoons that I’ve visited. Still, it was a pleasant enough environment, given that we had no lounge in which to hide, and their nachos were very good. The red Shiraz, B-ink [Barossa ink] was excellent, too; I can recommend it.

BA0293, an Airbus A380 super-jumbo, which I dislike, picked up a delay and was 1 hour late leaving. Such delays are not so bad if there’s no connecting flight to make. My QANTAS Airbus A380 to Sydney a few years back was two hours late when I did miss my connecting flight. I’m beginning to spot a pattern.

After an 8-hour flight, we finally landed at 21:30.

Dulles airport is like no other; at least, I don’t think it’s like any other. It is equipped with an enormous fleet of what I can best describe as bizarre “mobile lounges”, like very wide, large buses, whose passenger compartments wind up and down to aeroplane door height and maybe more to collect and deliver passengers between the to and the main terminal, i.e immigration. They look like something out of a sci-fi film set, or maybe a Gerry Anderson puppet show.

Our ESTAs worked well and immigration was a doddle – no more silly paper landing cards to fill out. We did, though have to have full sets of finger prints taken electronically by an unusually friendly immigration officer.

We were in. Furthermore, our bags turned up.

We had a booking at the Hyatt Place, 4 miles outside the airport. Our instructions were to phone, then hit “0” for the front desk to request a shuttle ride. My 2nd or 3rd attempt at an expensive international call [no roaming] worked. That is to it superficially worked. An American lady overheard my call and said she also was going to the Hyatt Place, had phoned twice and still had no shuttle.

We waited together. No shuttle continued to show up, during which time our new friend tried to make a further phone call, when another related shuttle bus showed up but for another Hyatt – the Hyatt. Corralled by our new friend, that driver agreed to take us to our hotel. The Hyatt Place shuttle was still sitting in the forecourt doing nothing. I let the American lady do the grumping at the front desk; they are so much better at it.

Our reservation worked, at least; we checked in and eventually arrived in our room at 23:00.

‘T was difficult getting to sleep.