Every day of this trip should be like today.

I got up early to have breakfast with my cousin Tracy and her two sweet rascally sons and was on the road by 8AM. Since I had plenty of time, I took a long route up through the Shenandoah National Park and drove tiny windy roads through small towns in the mountains. The fruit trees are beginning to blossom and greenery is peeking out of all the dead forest overgrowth.

There’s nothing like listening to really loud music and driving on an empty road with the whole day ahead of you.

In my continuing pursuit of the weird and wonderful, I stopped in Natural Falls, VA at the Enchanted Studios where I was lucky enough to catch Professor Cline.

Mark Cline runs Enchanted Studios, making props for any production that needs them. He also acts in local theatre productions and puts together an astonishing haunted house every Halloween. He likes putting together events around the holidays and here you get a peek preview of his April 1 “Jack the Giant Killer hands” that he plans to put up on a hill overlooking town.

He told me all about how he got into the business at age 17 because he needed a job and a resin artist needed an assistant. Once he figured out how to cast resin, he just looked for bigger and bigger projects until one day he had an idea.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:

Yes, that’s a scale model of Stonehenge, made out of 420lb blocks of Styrofoam and resin.

And it’s amazing. But just when you think your road trip and your day can’t improve, you drive up the road another couple of miles and come to Escape from Dinosaur Kingdom.

Here’s the story: in 1863 a friendly family of paleontologists stumble across a valley of live dinosaurs. The evil Yankee army hears of these riches and hatches an evil plan to use the dinosaurs as a weapon of mass destruction against the south. Many soldiers get eaten, some lose their clothes and chaos reigns.

I have SO many pictures from this park. It was officially closed but Mark told me to go in anyway so I was the only person there, hiking around, taking pictures and laughing my face off. GLORIOUS. Who thinks up these things? Mark Cline. That’s who. I’ll post the rest of the pictures on facebook at the end of the week.

It’s a bit hard to top something like that. So I drove the rest of the way to Greensboro, NC in one stretch and did Bikram here with Bruce.

Bikram lesson of today: Let the heat in.

It was a much less hot class than yesterday but instead of fighting against the heat, I tried breathing it in. I could do all the poses today – though none of them all that well… yet – and it was a much more enjoyable experience. He said that Friday night classes are his favorites and I agree that the class energy was awesome.

I’ll leave you with Bruce’s words of wisdom: Learn to control your breath. When you control your breath, you control your life.

Tomorrow I think I might see a lot of buttons. Let’s see what happens…