After visiting some friends for a nice lunch today, we took a drive to let the girls get a nap in the car. After a stop at Hill High Orchards in Round Hill, for a delicious pie, we moseyed on west and north.

I remembered a neat road running along a mountain ridge that will get you from Route 7 down to Paris, on Route 50. That road is Blue Ridge Mountain Road.

We passed the Mt. Weather EAC, intriguing because of the barbed wire and tarp-covered fencing. Upon returning home, I consulted my old pal Google and got the details on this mysterious site.

It seems that the Mt. Weather EAC is actually a 40-year old site created to provide a Continuity of Government facility in the Washington, DC, area during the Cold War. Unlike many Cold War-era sites, this one is still well-maintained and under constant use. FEMA uses the site for 24-hour management of disaster response, among other things. Various articles and websites speculate on Mt. Weather being the site where many Federal officials and Congress-folk went immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Some interesting links about the site:

• FEMA description of Mt. Weather
• Cold War DC Description
• Global Security Description