"The Hunted" Haunted Trail and Bonez & Booz.

Ms. B. and I were originally planning to visit friend/fellow author Richard Dansky in Durham, NC, this weekend to celebrate his birthday and drink his scotch, but since we came back from Wintergreen very much on the sniffly side, we decided not to potentially afflict anyone who might be in close quarters with us. Neither of us feels particularly terrible, so we figured we'd avail ourselves of some outdoor Halloween activities where we could effectively practice social distancing.

 

Friday night, we rode up to Ferrum, VA (the location of Ferrum College, my old alma mater), to visit their haunted trail, this year titled "The Hunt." As in previous year's, it's not all that elaborate, but the woods there are lovely as well as spooy (I haunted them frequently when I was in college, long before they became part of Ferrum Park, as they are now). There are plenty of weird sounds from deep in the woods, pitch-dark tunnels, roving monsters, and unexpected scares. Suffice it to say that, as we have in the past, Kimberly and I really enjoyed it. Plus, the wooded back roads to and from Ferrum are themselves pretty damned creepy, so the drive only added to the experience.

L: Our greeter; R: Wonder where that path leads...

A scary tunnel ahead!

I wonder who that is in the bloody fog!

Then, Saturday evening, Brugger and I decided to check out Bonez & Booz at the Virginia Museum of Natural History uptown. I had no idea how big an event this would be — several hundred people had packed the Museum's spacious parking lot, where the exhibits and vendors were set up. We immediately ran into friend Joe Keiper, the museum's executive director, and spent a little while chatting. Then Ms. B. and I went in search of beverages and vittles, which we found — the beer garden for drinks, a BBQ food truck for dinner. Both of us got BBQ quesadillas, and they were fantastic. We wandered a bit more and watched the fire dancing show, which was pretty cool. After that, we were pretty well tuckered out, so we returned home and watched Sinister, which is a favorite of ours.

I was kind of hoping our mysterious ghost (guest?) would have turned on our Halloween lights, but no such luck.

O Ugly Bird

Well, here's something I don't get to do every day. A little while ago, I saw down by the creek across the road a turkey vulture hung up in something, struggling to get free. I grabbed my machete and folding knife, went down there to check it out, and found that the bird's legs and one wing were tangled in fishing line, which was dangling from a tree. About then, Dr. Joe Keiper, who works at the Virginia Museum of Natural History here in town, happened to be driving by, so he came down and, with a forked stick, was able to keep the bird pinned so I could cut the fishing line. The critter was pretty well exhausted, I think, so it lay there calmly as we worked. Together, we managed to get all the fishing line untangled and removed. Birdo flies off like nothing ever happened.

Damned ugly fellow (the bird, not Joe), but I'm very glad things ended well enough for it.

Speakeasy on Starling

Friends Bob & Yvonne accompanied Brugger and me to a unique and entertaining event last night at the Virginia Museum of Natural History — "Speakeasy on Starling" it was called ("Starling" referring to the street address of the Museum). This was a fun, fund-raising event for which you really got your money's worth — heavy hors d'oeuvres (good ones, too!), beer, wine, and other spirits, including a bourbon and mojito tasting. Some damn good bourbons on hand, I must admit. The tasting quantities were small, but they packed a pretty good wallop. A silent auction of some particularly nice spirits (none of us won) and a Velociraptor egg hunt, which netted everyone a nice little prize (a Long Island Iced Tea for me), added to the fun. Most entertaining was that, in order to learn the whereabouts of the bourbon tasting, you had to follow clues around the museum and then be escorted to it by staff member/journalist/friend Ben R. Williams. I also encountered a couple of old friends from days long past in the old hometown.

Afterward, our gang retired to Ground Zero, where we enjoyed some rocking tunes and sampled a few more spirits. I'd love to see the museum make this a regular event. It was a touch of what we figure some much-needed culture in our little burg. Plus, that museum is full of dinosaurs. I figure you can't go too far wrong with spirits and dinosaurs.

The password was "Claws," by the way.

A velociraptor photobombing the group making their way to the bourbon tasting

Anyone for Scorpion?

Manchurian Scorpion, to be precise. Tastes quite like a very salty pistachio with a hint of fish on the finish. I had a couple of them, then chased them with a handful of crickets roasted in honey mustard.

Today was Bug Festival at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville. Since I had to attend to Mum this weekend anyway, Ms. Brugger agreed to accompany me that we might attend the Bug Festival, among other festive thingummies. Last night, we left Greensboro and headed to the Third Bay for dinner with our friends Stephen and Samaire Provost, who had moved to Martinsville from California several months ago. As always, the food, drink, and company made for a better-than-pleasant evening. Quite by happenstance, at the restaurant, we ran into geocaching friend VAVAPAM (a.k.a. Pam), whom I had earlier introduced to Stephen because he was writing a book about the history of department stores, and Pam's family used to own Globman's Department Store in uptown Martinsville. Globman's was a bona fide fixture in town for most of a century, and it's nice to see it getting coverage in Stephen's upcoming book.

After dinner, Ms. B. and I had a number of errands to run, which kept us out later than we expected. Still, since it was such a beautiful — almost chilly — evening, once we retired to Mum's, we sat out on the back deck with a bottle of good wine until the morning's wee hours.

Ben R. Williams, the museum's
Science Administrator-cum-bug-
server extraordinaire

This morning, we scrounged up a tasty breakfast at Daily Grind uptown, where I have, on occasion, made an unpleasant racket on my guitar. No noise today, just coffee and a really good (and huge) bacon, egg, & cheese croissant. Then to the museum for the Bug Fest. We found a decent crowd (it got much more crowded later) and a passel o' bugs. Everything from tarantulas to crayfish to walking stick insects to to vinegaroons to giant mantises to hissing Madagascar cockroaches (I used to co-habitate with Madagascar cockroaches in Chicago, courtesy my roommate Bill). And then the pièce de résistance, the "Eat a Bug" challenge. My friend Ben R. Williams, formerly a reporter for the Martinsville Bulletin, now Science Administrator at the museum, manned the food corner, with plentiful supplies of Manchurian scorpions, water beetles, and crickets.

So, have a look back the beginning of this blog entry. Yummy bugs. They probably won't move to the top of my dietary staples, but I didn't find them at all objectionable. Ben did warn me that the water beetle was anything but appetizing, so that's the only one I didn't try. Some other time, perhaps.

Following the festival, I did maintenance on a few of my nearby geocaches. Then we had to hit to road for Reidsville, to meet friends Suntigres (a.k.a. Bridget) and BigG7777 (a.k.a. Gerry) for lunch at The Celtic Fringe. The bugs hadn't spoiled my appetite, though — both Bridget and I availed ourselves to their Welsh Dragon Burger, which comes adorned with Carolina Reaper Pepper sauce. That is hot, hot, HOT stuff, I can tell you. It's the best burger in the world. Bridget and I laughed. We cried. We cried A LOT. And I brought some of that sauce home so I can cry all over again. Scorpion stings ain't got nothing on this hot stuff.

We concluded our outing by visiting the Patrick-Watson graveyard, which is a tiny little boneyard in the remote woods between Greensboro and Reidsville. I had already found the geocache there, but Gerry & Bridget still needed it. They made short work of the cache, and we spent some pleasant time out there among the dead. Brugger made some rubbings of the old gravestones (which date back to the late 18th/early 19th centuries).

Despite the allure of the grave sites, we left no man (or woman) behind, and back home we came. It's already been a busy and satisfying weekend, and there is more geocaching on the docket for tomorrow. Till then, be goot!

Three geocachers and one muggle at The Celtic Fringe in Reidsville

Suntigres watching out for the Walking Dead on her approach to the cache

Ms. B. making rubbings on one of the old gravestones

Yeah, they're dead, they're all messed up.