Monday at JMU

We took a quick trip out to Harrisonburg, Virginia, for a campus tour of James Madison University this weekend.

We started with a family visit on Easter Sunday in Montgomery Village, west of Washington DC. My sister Margaret and her husband Lou host an Easter party most years at their home. We get to see most of not all of my family and lots of Lou's family as well. After loads of food and a great deal of conversation, we drove south to Manassas, Virginia, where we holed up in a Holiday Inn for the night.

Monday morning, we headed west on I-66 and south on I-81 to Harrisonburg and James Madison University.

JMU is a pretty cool school. It is a slightly sprawling campus; certainly walkable but spreading 100 years of architectural history across a series of hills. A young man from Karen's church is a freshman there and he joined us for lunch and gave us his own tour after we took the official tour.

Nice place. It might be worth an application for Colleen. If she wants.

I took a scenic detour on the ride home. JMU is in the Shenandoah Valley, between a pair of mountain ranges. It was just a short hop east off of I-81 to reach Skyline Drive, which follows the tops of the mountains through Shenandoah National Park. We got to drive the northern quarter of the park. It was late afternoon on a cloudy day, but worth the extra 45 minutes or so to it added to the drive home.

I am drawn to both mountains and water. I live near the ocean, but miss mountains. So I was happy to drive in even the low mountains of western Virginia.