We went over the river on the Jubal Early ferry, bypassed the crowded malls, and landed at the Oatlands Historic House and Gardens in Leesburg, Virginia. A former plantation belonging to a significant founding family, the Carters, then valued by the Eustis family in the early 1900s who were instrumental in founding the National Trust. The site is another great property administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Coastal Landscape Map shows the relationship of Savannah's neat grid over the sinuous coastal landscape carved by water and gentle topography.
Wright Square was sold when I arrived to look around Friday night and I picked up Coastal Landscape Map Sunday after the show. It sits here on my couch, now, until it finds a real home. 
The Jamborree in Floyd, Virginia is bigger than ever. It looked to me like the Cracker Barrel, all renovated and much larger and nicer and newer with new "pressed-tin" ceilings. Thanks goodness they kept the old wooden floor that's seen so many dancers' taps. A lot of the old folks were there, too and lots of new ones. Banjoes and fiddles and guitars, stand-up bass, still played around town in every nook and cranny they could find.
So far, I've never lived anywhere longer than Blacksburg. It felt like home. This is the memorial to the students and teachers who lost their lives in April 2007, a stone and a holly bush for each.
View of Pearisburg from Angel's Rest on the Appalachian Trail.
The best surprise, besides seeing good friends so happy, was re-visiting Newport and Eggleston, two of the towns I documented ten years ago. Newport looks exactly the same. The old store in Eggleston, where I first met shopkeeper Gladys Dowdy, is open as a restaurant with live music and a great menu! After some recent years of vacancy after Gladys passed away, the 1926 building is beautiful as ever and the old cash register Gladys used is still there. 
Today I visited Charleston, South Carolina and snooped around the School of the Building Arts, all spooked out for Halloween. Not much to be done to transform this school, the Old City Jail, into a bona fide Haunted House. I did not get to experience the Haunted House they had on, but admired from behind the four-foot thick brick walls, barred windows, and iron gates. An ancient paddy wagon in the yard was surrounded by the students' building projects in timber framing, masonry, stone-laying, even a kiln.
More about the American College of Building Arts in Charleston, SC. 
Looking out from the driveway of The Nest, home of the Mosely family, toward State Road 60 in Brandon, Florida. Six lanes of constant traffic. 
Would you believe this is the road at the end of the driveway in the forest? SR 60
Signs read, No Trespassing and Private Road. We proceed with trepidation, hoping to be found friends, not intruders. Afton's mother and father have visited with Ms. Mosely years ago, but we have no appointment or recommendation to drop in on her private Friday morning.
We find ourselves in a dramatically different landscape, just 1/2 mile from the highway. Even the traffic noise dissipates. We've gone back in time.
Standing on the front porch of the house which seems to blend into the woods, I pull the ring attached to a long string attached to an old rusty bell. We wait for what seems like five minutes and a second ring brings a kind older face to the window. Ms. Mosely smiles and waves and we breathe a sigh of releif, though still a bit nervous until she opens the door and we explain that we have read her book, Come to My Sunland, a compilation of her grandmother's letters and the history of The Nest and life in wild, rural 1800s Florida. We just wanted to see the house and tell her how much we appreciate what she is doing to preserve it.
Ms. Mosely used to be a piano teacher. She keeps a guest book on the piano which we were happy to sign. The painitng is by her grandmotherJulia. The columns of the fireplace are palm trunks.
The most famous aspect of The Nest may be its unique wall-covering. In keeping with the house's innovative use of vernacular materials, all things found in the wilds of 1800s Florida, Julia knit palm fronds together to form a kind of wallpaper and painted vines and flowers as a final decorative touch. Ms. Mosely is seeking assistance on how to preserve the wall coverings.
We were invited to sit on the veranda, an open space between enclosed portions of the house. It's like a "dogtrot" but open to receive breezes from four directions.
Ms. Mosely notes the photos of this house in Afton's copy of Come to My Sunland. She kept her hand at a pad of paper as we talked and we both drew maps as she spoke of the road projects she has averted from her home and I spoke of the urban plan of Savannah and it's squares. 
The original board and batten, painted red and yellow, were covered by cedar shakes in the 1900s.
A silhouette painting of a picnic, the picnickers going out for the day (right) with energy and anticipation; the picnickers coming home after the day's picnic (left), tired.
Ms. Julia Winifred Mosely is an amazing woman. She lived a full life and had several different careers before settling into her destined role as the keeper of The Nest and the Mosely legacy in Brandon, Florida. She is continuously engaged with historians, architecture students, planners, and neighbors as she seeks to preserve the special history of her home and her region. She has amassed a lifetime of stores which she freely shared with us. I will not share them here, they are hers. Afton and I agreed that someone must tell her story, as she told the story of her grandmother in Come to My Sunland.
Original outbuildings exhibit the old board and batten siding which covered the house, in red and yellow.
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