July 17 - August 1, 2021
Trip up to the in-laws to celebrate SIL and BIL 25th anniversary!
We ended up having a hell of a time finding a hotel room at the halfway point, Virginia. We stopped at multiple locations, everything was full. Finally, we found a place and we were relieved to get off the road. Turns out, it was an absolutely AMAZING place - The Blackburn Inn. It was breathtakingly beautiful, I feel so lucky we found this place. It was many large, red brick, colonial style buildings. They were all multistory buildings, and they were close to each other, but it was clearly on a large piece of land.
So in the morning, I did some reading to try to figure out what this collection of massive buildings used to be. And hooo-boy, did I love this part! The Blackburn Inn used to be the Western State Lunatic Asylum or Western State Hospital. The history was fascinating and it really turned out to be an excellent story to tell to all the family while we were in New York.