The Autumn Ramp Park is awesome (and we’ll be adding plenty of pictures soon so stay tuned). Here’s a little video we shot while taking it all in. More once we’re back home.

Ernestine was our Flight Attendant on our first flight of the trip. She kept us laughing the whole way from Greensboro to Washington, DC. Her best line came as we were taxiing out to the runway. We had been delayed a bit and so the pilot was obviously in a hurry to get us off the ground, so he was rolling out pretty fast, and she stumbled walking back to check on all the passengers. At one point, after a pretty hard right turn, she looked at us and said, “He’s trying to kill me.” Not very comforting words from the Flight Attendant just before take-off.

Did you miss Part I, Part II or Part III?

My rest complete, I crawled up the last few feet and peered over the edge to see the man. To my horror and disappointment, he wasn’t there! I scrambled to the top and began searching frantically for the man who had so inspired my climb. Realizing that my search was in vain, I closed my eyes. I pictured the man and for the first time I saw how small he had been in comparison to the rock. I felt the power of the rock and I realized where his power had come from. He had merely been an extension of the rock. My mind raced with unanswered questions. What had been his purpose? How had he found the rock? Why me now?

Without warning, something stirred below where I had once been. As I looked closely, I noticed that someone had fallen and, finally, it all made sense. Just as the man had led me to this place of oneness with the rock and stability in the wind, so he had been led by a man, and that man by another man, and another man before him, and so on. They had all climber the rock and in turn stood as an example to unstable men of the stability that comes in being totally dependant upon the rock. Realizing this, I humbly accepted my role in this cycle of men.

At once, the power of the rock surged through my being and, shoving my hands deep into my pockets and drawing my face tight, I leaned into the wind. And as the men before me had, and the men after me would, I became the man on the rock.