Northern Neck of Virginia

Last weekend, Sarah, Jane and I headed off to the Northern Neck of Virginia, a part of the world that had somehow escaped us for the last thirty years.  It was a revelation.  It is less than two hours away from Falls Church and you find yourself in a very secluded and quite different part of Virginia.  

We stayed at a house near a very tiny town called Montross on a peninsula that overlooks the Potomac River on the eastern side (below) and the Rappahannock River on the western side.  

Above are the dramatic Horsehead Cliffs on the banks of the Potomac River where fossils of whales, sharks and other denizens of the deep have been found intact.  The last notable find about three years ago was the huge and intact skull of a baleine whale that was carbon dated at 15 million years old!

Further downriver from the Horsehead Cliffs is the Westmoreland State Park where there is a beautiful beach and even an Olympic size swimming pool if you don't want to brave the brown waters of the muddy Potomac.  We swam in the river and it was just fine--except that the water was too hot after all the 100F days we have endured recently.

This was the Airbnb house where we stayed.  It was just down the road from a beautiful spring-fed lake where you could swim and kayak.  I decided not to swim there after a local told me that they had found an invasive species snake-head fish there, not to mention a 3-foot (that is not a typo) frog when measured from head to toe and a very large snapping turtle that "could have taken you down".  Instead, we swam at the beach and also at the Stratford Harbor Club which boasted a large blue pool and tennis courts plus a big clubhouse (courtesy of our Airbnb house).

The house was very comfortable and had a good sitting room, large kitchen and dining room and three bedrooms upstairs. It was a totally relaxing place--rather secluded and a good place to write your novel.  But you might need longer than a weekend for that.

Here are Sarah and Jane on a beach called Shark Tooth Beach where you can see fossil hunters in the background with their sieves looking for, yes, sharks' teeth and other fossils.

Meanwhile, back at Westmoreland State Park, there were quite a few people fishing from the rocks but I did not see too many fish being caught.  The water was too hot and very muddy--the fish probably couldn't see the bait.

It was hot work having fun and some of us had to drink a bottle of water every ten minutes to recover from the ambient temperature.

Here is a better view of the Horsehead Cliffs--the formation is supposed to resemble a horsehead but I just didn't get that impression at all.  The Brits had fired at the cliffs during the Revolutionary War and might well have destroyed the horse head look.  Damned Brits!

And on our last morning, we went to another Shark Tooth beach but this was privately owned but we had a pass to get in.  We were the only ones there on a Monday morning and we perfected our tans before heading back to the Big Smoke.