Paradise Found-The Train Ride

It wasn't that easy to get to Paint Bank, Virginia. In Philadelphia you can get anywhere you want to quickly, after all it's 1870, everything in Philadelphia is modern, not so in the little back woods town that my Mother and Father insist is going to be our future and fortune. We had ridden and changed trains for 3 days, slept as we could, eaten on the run and I was tired...tired of all this traveling to someplace I didn't really want to go. I didn't even care that the sunrise that morning was really something Gothic....a brilliant sliver of gold cutting the mountain life a knife...I didn't even care that my Father, who had left 10 months earlier, had secured our new home and was there to pick us up for the long wagon ride 38 miles to Paint Bank. I didn't even care that he was deeply embedded and successful in his business and the home was a grand two story house with a position on Potts creek right in the middle of town. I don't even remember the 38 mile ride from Ripplemead, Va. over the breath-taking New River, through this paradise valley, past all the settlements in-between, down the drive to our beautiful new home. I wish I had been awake and alert that day, instead of sleeping the whole way. I wish I could have cataloged every inch of this Paradise we were traveling through...I wished I had put it to memory, but alas, I was 14 years old...I didn't care about anything important then. Now, I'm going to take the first train ride on the first day of The Potts Valley Train..a journey back through that valley that I came down almost 40 years ago...a sentimental journey recalling memories and people of the past...with an anticipation of a more memorable and exciting future...for the little back woods town of Paint Bank,Virginia is now,on this memorable day,on the precipice of becoming a destination.
(Join me for another installment of "Paradise Found" chronicling Paint Bank from it's inception in 1851 through booms and lean times till the present day.)

We're just 2 weeks away from Spring...14 days.


Word of the Day: Rara Avis (Rair-uh-Ay-vis) noun
Meaning: A rare or unique person or thing.