Red River Gorge and New River Gorge

Joe and I have arrived in Virginia and are currently staying with Zach and his family.  Tomorrow we will drive to North Carolina, where we fly out of on Friday at 6 in the morning.  From Saturday to Monday, we camped and climbed at the Red River Gorge in Kentucky.  The weather wasn't great--it started raining Saturday night and did not stop until Monday morning.  We moved our campsite into an empty horse barn and climbed at overhanging cliffs, so thankfully we stayed dry most of the time!  On our last day at the Red, we hiked to a cliff that was--unfortunately--wet, so we were not able to climb there.  However, the area was interesting biologically--we found a bright orange newt, with red spots on its back, which we have never seen before in Arkansas.  After researching on the internet, we determined that the newt was a juvenile Notophthalmus viridescens, or Eastern newt.  This is the same species we have in Arkansas, but we have only ever seen the aquatic adults, which are brown with yellow bellies. I have posted an image from the internet below; unfortunately, we couldn't get a picture of our own.  On Tuesday morning we drove to the New River Gorge in West Virginia and were able to climb there only for that one day, but we made the most of it.  The area was muddy, but we had a great time.  We are now in Blacksburg, VA, which is the home of Virginia Tech University; compared to UCA, Virginia Tech is massive!  The central campus looks somewhat like a traditional campus, but Virginia Tech is a great veterinary and agricultural school, so there are many outlying research areas that look like farms surrounding the central campus.  We were fascinated by the cows, which Zach informed us have plexi-glass inserts that allow students to see and work inside a living cow without surgically opening it!  We had never heard of such a thing.  That's all for now, we have to get up pretty early to begin our journey tomorrow.  I hope everyone is doing well!
~Chelsea