the nameless church

Then we visited our friends Ryan & Ashley and Ian & Jamie, two young couples who live together in a big house and are part of an emerging-church group that, last time we saw them, didn't yet have a name--hence the "nameless church." We stayed with them over Labor Day weekend, eating more hamburgers than we've eaten on the trip yet! (Somehow it seemed like everybody organized a cookout on a different day, and we made it to most of them...) We hung out, rested, I worked some more on the book... We watched "Little Miss Sunshine," a truly hilarious movie about a family of disparate eccentrics who go on a long road-trip in an old Volkswagen van without a starter, in hopes of arriving on time for the Little Miss Sunshine contest that their little daughter has qualified for. Every time they start the van there's a scene of them all pushing it and then running to catch up to it, jumping in the side door one after the other...

The really funny thing is that Ryan and Ashley recently acquired and took a road trip in, you guessed it... an old Volkswagen van without a starter! Just for kicks on our last night there we decided to drive the van to Carle's, the most famous of Fredericksburg ice cream places, (where Dan and Hannah had also taken us our first night there!) for some ice cream. We had a great re-enactment of all those movie scenes right there in the street, jumping in the door breathless and laughing, the entertainment of the evening for everyone who saw us.

Ashley had a book about knitting lying around, and I got interested (my mom taught me when I was little but I'd long forgotten how) and Ashley gave me a refresher course--and some needles and yarn! So now I have something to do with myself if I'm stuck with no library and no book...

We left Fredericksburg by bus. We'd been planning this for awhile; we'd been noting that we weren't moving south fast enough, and even though in this weather it seems hard to believe, we weren't staying ahead of the winter as we needed to. So... with some money some generous people earlier in the trip had given us, we took the bus from Fredericksburg, VA to Greensboro, NC, and saved ourselves about a month of walking. I watched from the bus window as the first few scattered jack pines among the woods began to take over, and the dirt turned reddish; I saw my first redbud and my first magnolia. Back in the South. It's been a long time.