We spend a lot of time in the New River Gorge hunting for mushrooms. When we’re not hunting mushrooms we’re usually talking about hunting mushrooms, which often prompts people to ask us why we enjoy it so much. Sometimes, we fear, they soon regret asking because we can go on and on about the many, […]

When we heard about the New River Gorge 100 Mile Challenge last year, we knew that we wanted to participate. We love The Gorge, we love hiking and we love challenges, so the idea of putting in 100 miles in the calendar year seemed perfectly suited for us. We wasted no time, putting in our first […]

It’s what we live for. Really. A word cloud made up from our guest’s comments We love it when our guests are blown away with what they find at Lafayette Flats, and we love it when they tell us about it either in person or in reviews left online. We love it when people recognize […]

Back in late 2014, we set a personal goal to hike at least one serious trail in the New River Gorge each month. Here are the links to the blog post about our adventure: A Year of Hiking, Part 1: January – April A Year of Hiking, Part 2: May – August A Year of […]

Our last two posts documented two-thirds of our year of hiking (Part 1: Jan – April and Part 2: May – August). This post will take us from September to December. In the next post, the last of the series, we will tell you our favorites and give our recommendations for seasonal hikes. Thurmond as […]

In Part 1 we told you about the brutal winter hikes in The Gorge and how we persevered to reach our goal of at least one serious hike per month. As the weather warmed up, our goal became much more pleasurable to face, but with so many trails and so little time, we had to […]

Last November we set a personal goal to take at least one serious hike each month in 2015. Trestle on Mill Creek Trail (Ansted Rail Trail) It actually seemed to us like a modest goal, because we both love to hike and it sounded completely doable to us at the time: Memories of biting winter […]

May marked the one-year anniversary of the opening of Lafayette Flats. As we begin our second year of welcoming visitors to Fayetteville, we are thrilled that some of last year’s guests have already booked their flats for this summer, and that we continue to receive nothing but 5-star reviews from each and every guest that […]

Here is a picture of Lafayette Flats’ mascot, a green Peregrine Falcon. How it came to be our mascot is a bit of a long story, but we think it’s amusing. Our Mascot, the Peregrine Falcon (or is it a “Pear Green Falcon”?) First, you might ask, why do we need a mascot? The simple […]

Even though we generated and received many great ideas, we have struggled with naming the flats. Old mine town names felt too lonely; local celebrity names already garner plenty of attention; and names of natural elements don’t quite capture the spirit of the Gorge. In an effort to respect the past while looking toward the […]