“We usually spend holidays together. And the Thanksgiving before the gorge trip we were talking about how we hadn’t really done a big family vacation like this.” Danielle Kirk themselves hooked on the idea of an adventure at New River Gorge. With her family’s blessing, via their regular Skype, mass texts, mass emails, and phone calls, Danielle switched to planning mode. “I did a lot of research and investigated our options and came up with my own notion of what an ideal package would be for our family.” It was a challenge, Danielle
admits. “We wanted to have an adventure, but we are not a ‘rough it’ family. We didn’t want to camp and cook beans. My mother needed a shower and a bathroom. My father wanted air conditioning. My sisters wanted beds.” Danielle reached out to Shauna King, senior reservationist at Adventures on the Gorge, and the two planned the perfect getaway, a package that would include deluxe vacation home rentals—one at the 5,000-square-foot Lynn’s Pond House and one at the four-bedroom Falcon Ridge home—and activities like massages, a hike, trust exercises, and a four-acre woodland ropes course called the TimberTrek Aerial Adventure Park. “We had such a broad range of ages (12 to 70) and experience levels. We wanted to have a lot to do but nothing that would be too stressful. I looked at every single physical activity, then my family had to vote on the activities, and then we came up with a final list.” On that list were family favorites like dining in town at places like Secret Sandwich Society in Fayetteville, family cook-offs,
movie nights, singing, and playing games at the house as well as a few out-of-thebox activities meant to get the adrenaline pumping. “We hiked and looked out over the gorge. We tried local foods. We did group exercises on working together and trusting each other. We even did paintballing in the woods. I ended up being like General Patton and my sister and her husband turned out to be the best sharpshooters,” Danielle says. Large though the family may be, they agree on one thing. “At the end of the day it was one of the best experiences we’ve ever had as a family. It doesn’t take much to entertain us, but the services were so amazing. We met so many amazing people who worked there— from our hiking guide to our rafting guide to Shauna,” Danielle says. “The activities we did brought us a new perspective on one another. We were exhausted by the time we left, but it was a fantastic experience.” written by mikenna pierotti photographed by whitewater photography
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