One of the good things about the rainy weekend was spending time at the Pancake House outside of Fayettvile, with it’s ‘truck-stop like atmosphere’. When you asked for pancakes, you got 3 enormous dinner plate sized pancakes, covered in butter, and as much whipped cream and maple syrup as you could possibly want (me, I didn’t want any, and in fact I ended up getting a waffle instead, which was also enormous).

I have decided that Walmart is a scary scary place though. Apart from all of the fat Americans running around, I’m having trouble reconciling myself to the fact that there are crossbows and guns on display just next to the manchester.

West Virginia has proven to be rather wet of late, with three of the last four weekends involving far too much rain. And it’s unlikely to let up any time soon, as Hurricane Katrina will be headed that way after doing its best on New Orleans (of course, it won’t be a hurricane any more, just a patch of nasty weather).

It stopped raining for about 46 minutes* over the weekend. Long enough to set up a slackline in the campground, and fall off it a few times.

In other news, the fabric on my thermarest has started bubbling, so when I inflate it, it now looks like it has a tumour. I didn’t like to mention anything infront of it, but I think perhaps its days are numbered. On the plus side, I now own down booties (and I hadn’t realised I could construct a sentence using the letters ‘wno’ so many times).

* Time quoted may be an exaggeration

Traffic lights – inbetween being green and red, what colour are they?

When I was younger, I remember reading the book Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes. Sadako was trying to fold 1000 paper cranes – according to a Japanese legend, she would then get a wish. In a rather garbled take on this idea, I’m helping my friend fold 1000 paper cranes as a gift for someone else. We’re not quite there yet. One thousand paper cranes is rather a lot.

More photos from that sinful hotbed of wet climbing activity, Summersville Lake.

The hoards, they were swarming across the rock.

Henry found a fun looking hand traverse, which he set out across once the photographers were in place

Lara jumps off the cliff. The highest style points from the weekend go to Alyce though, who was the only one to do a flip off the cliff (a perfectly executed one at that).

We had reached Longs Point when we started hearing the thunder, and the call from Ocean (ex-lifeguard) came: “Out of the water kids!”. The large bearded gentleman, pictured flying through the air, managed to climb up onto the arete wearing sneakers only.

Ocean tried to follow up after him, but got stuck at this point under the roof: “I have to throw for that?”.

Also, note to google: “Air Cloud online”. Is that really the best you can do when I do a search for work related sites, and you’re desperately trying to find relevant things to advertise? Because I don’t want to buy an air cloud. I have no idea what they are, but it doesn’t seem to be something I should be paying for. However, if what you’re trying to sell to me is actually a little miniature atmosphere system, that can hang out in the rooms of my house, so I have little cloud systems and miniature fronts developing across my roof, then that would be rather cool, and I wholeheartedly approve (provided they’re not going to rain on me).

The weekend was spent playing in the water at Summersville Lake (deep water soloing if you will). We had a pontoon on Saturday, until a thunderstorm came along, and some people started to get dubious about how well lightning and metal boats go together. So the boat was returned, we were pelted with rain for 3 minutes, then the weather was perfectly fine again. Of course!

Plans to go bouldering at full moon were ruined by the weather, which kept getting overcast and thunderstorming on us. Come Sunday morning, everything was soaking wet, and most of the crew were keen to get back to civilisation – except for the hardy group who fought their way down to Pirates Cove and swam around in the sun, enjoying the views and gorgeous sunny weather for a few more hours. I don’t know how we managed to do it, really I don’t.

Well, I had an absolutely spiffing weekend. We went to Summersville Lake in West Virginia, and I was allowed on the boat on Saturday. While they all went hurling themselves in the water and climbing up the cliffs, I was reclining and enjoying the scenery.

I got to hang out with Vegas again, which I rather enjoyed. I also met Ness, who is a charming young lady. This is me giving her a back massage.

I spent some time playing with Alyce as well – here I am sitting on her lap while she teaches me how to drive the boat.