On our recent trip to State College, Pennsylvania (home of Penn State and the Nittany Lions) we really fell in love with the area. As I said before, we went over to Bellefonte, PA and got some great photos of Victorian homes there. We really enjoyed the time we spent walking up and down the streets of Bellefonte. We got lots of photos for possible cross stitch designs.We stayed in downtown State College at the Days Inn downtown. It was within walking distance of the college campus and the shops and restaurants. We ate breakfast at the Pannera Bread Company - their egg souffles are great! Saturday night several of the judges got together and ate upstairs at "The Corner" (the corner of College and Allen) at the Allen Street Grill. The food was very good and the atmosphere was quiet enough for pleasant conversation. Jim enjoyed the hiking around the area of State College while I judged the Nita Nee shows on Saturday and Sunday.
Our drive home was quite productive in taking photos. We stopped in Winchester, VA - a gorgeous town where the main street downtown has been made into a pedestrian mall. We wandered all over the area taking photos of the downtown area. There's also a really great brick fire station that caught our attention. We took a lot of photos of the fire station - not sure exactly what I'm going to do with them yet.We wandered through the Virginia countryside before we were forced back onto Interstate 81 to head home. We even found a covered bridge just south of Mt. Jackson.
We love taking photos of covered bridges. I'm not sure how many counted cross stitch designs I can do of them even though the one of Humpback Bridge in the fall has done very well. We stopped in New Market to eat dinner at the Southern Kitchen Restaurant. It was first opened in 1955 and retains much of the atmosphere of that era. We found personal juke boxes at the booths and ate some really good fried chicken and cole slaw. We just had to try the peanut soup - yes, I said PEANUT soup! It really tasted like peanuts and was pretty good, but not as tasty as the fried chicken. My favorite spot of the whole trip was when we stumbled across the Blue Ridge Grocery near Flint Hill.
We are going back to Pennsylvania so that I can judge the Mt. Pocono and Lehigh Valley shows on Jim's birthday (September 12). Jim is going with me (there are mountains nearby!) so he will do some more hiking and we'll wander the countryside again on the way home looking for more photos to add to our ever increasing album.
