This is not a Utah hiking report but…

I was on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia when I got a cell phone call letting me know that I had been laid off from my network engineer job of eleven years at Novell Inc. The layoff was company wide but that didn’t help the feeling of panic. (My boss and my boss’s boss were also laid off!)

This really put a crimp in my arch hunting plans for the next year of unemployment. (Fortunately, Novell’s layoff package was generous so I didn’t exactly hurry to find a new job for a year.)

And what was I doing in Virginia?

My wife has a brother living in Raleigh, North Carolina so we jumped on a plane with my wife’s parents, one of my wife’s sisters, plus my son and my oldest daughter. We joined up with yet another of my wife’s brothers after we arrived.

[Is this what you want the clouds to look like on the day you want to fly?]

We rented a van and began exploring the area. We especially wanted to visit Washington, D.C.

Lincoln Memorial

U.S. Capital Building.

Smithsonian Instaitute.

Arlington Cemetery.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Vietnam Memorial.

The Washington Monument.

Washington National Archives.

The White House.

On other days, we visited Thomas Jefferson’s home Monticello, Virginia.

Williamsburg, Virgina.

Gettysburg, Virginia.

Point Harbor.

Dark Hollow Creek.

Blue Ridge Mountains where I got to spend some time on the Appalachian Trail.

I don’t remember how many days we spent touring around but by the time we got to Kitty Hawk, we were all pretty much DONE!

… and at least one of us was unemployed.