36 Hours in Virginia

10 March 2025

Matt is currently cruising the East Coast on another Skylanders run and along his route is a community member who has a large collection of rare figures out of box, which is something he’s wanted pictures of for a while now so after work I threw my camera and some clothes in a backpack, hopped a couple flights and joined him for a day of product photography.

The tiniest little airplane out of my regional airport:

I’m 5’8″ and had to duck to enter the plane, and anyone over 6′ was brushing the ceiling:

Somewhere down there is my house:

We only flew at an altitude of like 23,000′ and there were almost no clouds, so I pulled up my hiker app and (somehow) was able to track my flight!

Lake Michigan:

(not the ocean like the guy behind me thought)

Dino skeleton at O’Hare airport along with some cheesecake (which I had to eat with a stir stick I snagged from Starbucks as I didn’t realize the cheesecake people didn’t give me a utensil and I forgot to pack my own)

My terminal at Dulles was not attached to the main terminal, so we had to hop on these people movers that I’m pretty sure came from Star Wars:

Pancakes in bed before tomorrow’s adventures:

(I probably should have turned off that light behind Matt)

11 March 2025

It took longer than expected to photograph all the figures- close to 4 hours! I’m not sure what his plans are for the pictures, so I’m not going to post them here, but what I can show you is our hike!

I found 2 hikes that sounded fun- the Blue Ridge Tunnel and the High Bridge Trail.

We did neither of those things.

I was only going off of generic addresses when I searched for cool hikes and we were looking at about a 2 hour drive to get to either hike, plus a close to 4 hour drive back to our hotel.

Lame.

So we visited Natural Bridge instead:

A bit disappointed in the $9 per person entrance fee (the other hikes were free, or maybe a small parking fee), but this was close and also seemed cool.