Feeling Blue in the Blue Ridge Mnts

---

After 3 days in DC and busily helping to set up Sierra in her new environs we fled to a people-less area, and are staying in a pretty amazing hotel in Warm Springs over the Blue Ridge Mnts in Virginia. The Warm Springs Motor Hotel - which says nothing about the fact that it is the old Warm Springs Courthouse and we are staying in the converted jailhouse. It is very plush and totally filled with collectibles ranging from confederate soldiers to art deco tables and lamps, African carvings, deep south antiques and monkeys - both real and fake. People with great drawls live here, and I’m tempted to say ya'all as well. Jule has deteriorated into sentences like “Now that we’ve aten lunch, les go”
This is the same hotel we stayed in 13 years ago, when a care-taker (the very German Kurt) and his friend/lover, a Moroccan pretty boy, were also taking care of a little monkey in diapers. They turned everyone away even tho the hotel was virtually empty, but took us in. This time the owners the only slightly less-colorful Moosie and Ruthie -- were here, and now there are 3 live monkeys and an outside cage. Apparently they stay here for 5 months, and then they go back to Florida because hibernation in cold weather does not make monkeys survive!
We slept like logs in the hotel decorated entirely and completely with antiques from everywhere, animals just being one motif. Then after a tasty breakfast by our German hosts we read and tubbed in the 200+ years Jefferson Springs ( looking much older than that), that has a ladies and a gents side. We were expected to be meditative, but- as Jule pointed out- when can a group of women be meditative? Still, we are most relaxed from this.
Now recovering in The Homestead, a destination resort here with rooms hundreds of $$ and up, built in 1776 and collecting golfers and others, We are sitting next to a pillar in the Great Hall that pipes out background classical music continuously. We chatted with an electrician who was redoing some very fancy rooms, and now I keep thinking about water- and other pipes flowing through all these ornaments. I guess I have nothing better to do-
I feel very empty, and exhausted. Good thing we are going to see Sierra again this weekend, I’m not quite ready for empty nest, although its here. Jule and I were discussing today that our purpose of raising independent children is highly overrated- what do we do now that we've succeeded in that? As our friend Kay says, empty nest is so traumatic that we might as well move. Fortunately we enjoy vacationing and travel together, and we are also looking forward to starting a new chapter of our lives in Oregon- that seems a small consolation to us, and to Sierra. But if she doesn't start calling more we might just stay here and rent a condo and see if there is work for me here. We're feeling a bit lost. Anita

---