The Saturday before last (the 11th), Mom, Lacy and I took a short trip to West Virginia to spend the night at my grandparent's house, so we could drive into LaVale,  to pick up our friend, Megan Paul.

We had been talking and planning for her to come and visit us, since we had never met (except by blog comments, twitter, and email). Megan and her Mom drove in from Ohio, and met us there at a parking lot in LaVale for the first time.

Shamefully to say, none of us got pictures of our first meeting, since we were all a bit nervous about meeting each other. As a matter of fact, we never even greeted each other! We just grinned and smiled

At first, before we met, we decided that we would pick her up on Sunday, and then the next Thursday we would drive back up to West Virginia where we would spend the night at my grandparent's house and then meet her Mom that next Friday morning.

Then, after we met them, the plans changed so we would meet back up the next Sunday of the following week. Oh we all were awful the first two days. Here we talked just about every day to each other across the internet, and then we hardly spoke when we met! It was strange, but we were all nervous and whatnot

After we got over the fear of talking to each other, we began to do more things together, such as discussing our beliefs, reading Scripture, going on photo shoots, frogging, biking and the sorts.

We do seem to get a bit camera happy at times, don't we? The red flowers are called Trumpet Vine, or Virginia Creeper, that we found down by the river at the bridge, when we went on our first bike ride, to look for those otters, but we never saw any.

Our last big bike ride, we rode out to the Bumpass Post Office and then to the little park to take some pictures. It was nice and shady there under the trees. As the week progressed, we soon found out that only a week visit was too short! So she decided to stay with us another week still!

We are having lots of fun with her here with us, and are still dreading the thought of her having to go home just in a few days… We still haven't got any pictures of all three of us yet, so we need to plan that for a nice overcast day (if we can get one..).

Overall, we've been having a great time with her here while she has been visiting us!

We spent the last week with our grandparents in the Wild, Wonderful, West Virginia, since we hadn't been up to visit them for the past two years! Those who have been following me on Twitter were able to read all that happened to us, while we were up there. Everyone else probably just thought I stopped blogging!

I took the laptop along with us and my new 50$ 56k dialup modem so I could connect to the internet to update/read twitter, post pictures and read emails. It was still slow, but it was better than nothing

I also took the camera along with me (how could I leave without it?) and took 1300+ pictures in just one week! Generally about 200-300 pictures a day, but sometimes less than that. So needless to say, I have a ton of pictures on my hand that I've got to dig through to post. I'll just make a separate post with pictures, and give some of the details of the trip in this one.

The day after we arrived, Pap had an appointment in Winchester, VA at 5:30am for them to pump some cement into his cracked vertebra. They left early in the morning, so we didn't get to see them leave (err, at least I didn't….). He is doing a tad bit better, but still has lower back problems.

We did make several trips to my Aunt's house where we took pictures, met with the rest of the family, and was able to connect to her wireless network with highspeed internet!!

We ate out at several different restaurants, such as Ruby Tuesday's, Linda's Restaurant, Hobo's, Dairy Queen and Chick-fil-a. We helped Gran clean the church (since they are janitors), and we went bicycle riding down the Great Allegheny Passage Bike Trail, with Uncle Wayne, Aunt Mel and Kyle.  We had a fun time doing that (since it was all downhill!) and getting to see the steam locomotive that rides from Cumberland to Frostburg with passengers.

Overall, we had a great time up there visiting with our grandparents and relatives, along with the bike riding and sight seeing!… apart from me getting car sick a few times

I'll be making a follow up post that contains some pictures