Capon Springs

Over the July 4th Holiday weekend, my entire family traveled to Capon Springs, WV for a long weekend of celebration. We were celebrating my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. Some of my parent’s friends threw elaborate parties at fancy restaurants costing up to $30,000. My parents however just wanted the whole family to be together at Capon so we could spend lots of time with one another.

Capon (pronounced Kay-pin with the emphasis on the first syllable) is a wonderful resort nestled just over the WV line near Strasburg, VA. My mothers' parents used to go many years ago and we have been going on and off for several years. Lately, we have been going more often. In fact, Melissa and I have spent our last 3 Fourth Of July Holidays at Capon.

Here is a little snippet from the http://www.caponsprings.net web site about the place:

The Capon Spring is one of eight known warm springs in West Virginia. It rises at the base of a huge vertical outcropping of Oriskany sandstone. The Spring located in Virginia until the state of West Virginia was formed in 1863, was one of the most popular springs in the Valley of Virginia and was believed to have health restoring powers. Its name is thought to be of Shawnee in origin, with spellings recorded as Cape-cape-pe-hon, Cacaphon, and Ca-ca-pa-on, meaning, healing waters, medicine waters, or waters that heal.

The web site goes into some detail about the history of the spring and the resort. Originally the spring area was developed as a bottling operation to bottle and sell the spring water. But back then, bottled water was not popular and the business did not do well. The owners of the spring area often invited their friends to stay there and eventually after noticing that all their friends kept coming back, they turned it into a resort.

Today, Capon sits on about 500 acres that includes the spring of course, as well as a farm, 10 to 15 residential buildings for guests, a big dining hall, a big playground and pool, a golf course, lots of trails, and a modern spa. The entire resort uses the spring water. Everything from the coffee, tea, and soups to the water in the toilet comes from the spring. The water just keeps coming up and does not look like it will ever stop in my lifetime.

Capon is an all inclusive resort. This is a very important detail for my Mom. She is still the primary meal provider for herself, my dad, and some of my brothers. Throughout the years of vacationing, she never really got a break. At Capon, breakfast is served in the dining hall at 8:30, lunch at 1 PM, dinner at 6 PM, and snack at 9:00 PM. The food is plentiful and much of it is homemade with fresh ingredients. For Melissa and I, it is a little heavy but most people love eggs, sausage and pancakes for breakfast, chicken, pork, pasta, turkey, and duck for lunches and dinners. Plus they always have a few dessert choices for all the lunches and dinners. I don’t partake in the desserts as I have given up desserts. Sometimes they have fresh fruit and I will partake in that.

We all arrived on Wednesday, June 30 in time for lunch. We got there around 12 or so and had time to relax before lunch. Capon is a family run resort and the people who work there are super friendly and know all of the guests by name. After lunch we checked in to our room. Our family had 4 rooms on the second floor of the Austin (one of the buildings) with a wonderful porch overlooking the Capon Campus.

We spent the next several days relaxing, visiting, hiking, biking, eating and basically just spending time together. It was great fun. For my parent’s anniversary, we put together a photo album with old pictures as well as personalized messages from each of us. On Saturday night after dinner we gave them the album. They were very surprised and wondered how we got the photos. Melissa and I had snuck several boxes of photos out of my parent’s house when we were up for the US vs Ghana soccer game. My parents really loved the album. Thanks goes out to Melissa for her artistic talents and skill in putting the whole thing together for us.

I must say I had a wonderful time. All of the after-dinner walks down to see the pigs, the hikes on the red trail, hiking the orange trail, hiking up to Eagles Rock, hiking up to the golf course for lunch on the hill and the wonderful fireworks, meals together, spa treatments, sitting on the porch together, biking with Melissa and drinking lots of Capon water made for a really nice weekend. Here are some pictures from the trip.