This past weekend, my wife and I went cabining in West Virginia with a few friends of ours. While we are not big campers (read: we have never been camping together and my wife has never been camping period), cabining is a nice way to “rough it” while still having some of the comforts of home. We were staying in a cabin built by a group of friends out of bales of straw stacked for walls and covered in stucco. Really neat stuff. The last dregs of winter brought us constant rain for the entire weekend, but the cabin kept us nice and toasty.

The nicest part about being at the cabin was the utter lack of real-time connection with the outside world. Being without internet was a nice change of pace; lately, I feel as though I’ve become overly attached to the computer. It is hard to go an hour without checking Facebook, looking at the latest Tweet’s (follow me @colinthomas ), seeing if I have a new comment on Flickr, looking at new entries on Google Reader, satifying my curiosity at wikipedia, tracking my website stats, and on and on… It is so easy to get sucked into the constant connection that I lose real connections. Being forced to spend two days with no internet and no computer let me enjoy just being. I was able to get a bit of reading done, take a nap, and go on a (rainy) walk. It was so nice. Coming back, I think that I am going to try turning off the computer every evening after a certain time unless I have something specific to do. Maybe I can rediscover the joy of being while at home, as well.

Pictures from the trip are linked below. Some of these were taken on a previous trip, but most were from this trip.