Summer's Over...

What do you call a group of people who park in front of your house at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, take a few pictures, let their kids walk in your flower beds and talk loudly to each other about how quaint your property looks?

The answer? Tourists, of course...

It's the time for them. The leaves are changing color and if you sit by the highway and watch, you're likely to see license plates from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and other such far off places running up and down the roads. The people in the cars are looking for things to photograph.

The mountains have some real beauty to offer tourists this time of year. It's difficult to capture in a picture the depth of color that takes hold of human eyeballs when driving through Appalachia in the Fall. Nonetheless, I have a few pictures of the color smorgasbord which I thought my readers might enjoy. I took a couple of the pictures myself. Others are drawn from the online photo albun of Buchanan Electronic Community Access (BECA), the electronic village in Buchanan County, Va.

One of the prettiest plants in the mountains in my humble opinion is a vine that climbs many of the trees in Appalachian Virginia. The vine turns a dark red near the onset of Fall. This picture was taken near my home; click on the picture for a full-sized view.

The pictures here from Buchanan County were taken for the most part at two locations. Some are from Compton Mountain, on the Virginia-West Virginia state line. The BECA photo album has several pictures from this area among its 60 or so pictures from around the county. This barn and tree shot is one of my favorites. I'm also partial to the picture of this house surrounded by the colors of Autumn.

Some of the best pictures in the BECA photo album were taken on the other side of the county - on the Virginia-Kentucky border. The Breaks Interstate Park there is a wonderful place to camp, hike and swim. A fork of the Holstein River there has cut the deepest canyon in the eastern U.S. and one rock formation rising from the river banks is known as the Towers. Many of the pictures of The Breaks area were taken from the air.

The BECA site is well developed and worth a visit and the photo album has lots of other pictures to enjoy.

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