Virginia - North Carolina: Sunday, October 9, 2022 | |
YOU BELONG HERE is a mural in downtown Staunton, but it feels like a theme for our trip. We love being on the road, exploring something new nearly everyday. We belong here. | |
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Today, we completed the loop that I had planned for yesterday. We blew through Lexington and drove up to Staunton. This town had just about as many taverns as our home town, Stevens Point, Wisconsin, which is saying a lot. For a Sunday morning, there were a lot of beer drinkers soaking up the suds, and soaking up the warm sun in the sidewalk seating areas set up along the downtown streets. We love how the towns in Virginia encourage the bars and restaurants to provide this outdoor seating.
Staunton has some very nice buildings, but they are starting to show a little rattiness due to a lack of maintenance. Still well on the good side of “seedy”, I encourage the town to tackle a little restoration before it gets out of control. But, with all the attractive taverns, I can’t complain. I liked Staunton.
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This was my favorite building in Staunton. | |
Looking up at the bell tower of this fine old building, you can see what I mean that some edifices need a little TLC. | |
What a clever name for a clock store. | We love the outdoor seating in these Virginian towns. This example looks especially comfortable. | Tobacco, being such an important historical agricultural product in Virginia, still has a presence in Virginian society. Smoke and vape shops, while they exist everywhere, seem more prevalent in Virginia. Yet, there aren’t that many more people smoking out in public. I think that even in Virginia, most people got the memo about tobacco. | St. Francis of Assisi, one of the few Catholic Churches that we’ve seen in Virginia. | |
At the north end of our loop, we stopped at Waynesboro. Like yesterday in Buena Vista, Waynesboro shut down its downtown for an outdoor market. This market, however, was a high-class top-notch art market. From sculptures, to paintings, to photography, to pottery, the beautiful, and sometimes avant-garde works, impressed us. The prices also impressed us. One wood sculptor priced his pieces at $3,000 to $4,000. They were spectacular, but surely that is way too rich for a street market. | A beautiful giant mural on the side of a brick building. | The local cinema, in this unassuming building, was running documentaries and selling wonderful smelling theater popcorn. | The entire downtown was cordoned off for the outdoor street art show. | A terrific painting of Sam Elliot. | These wooden sculptures were selling for $3,000 and more. Wow, I’m getting myself a lathe and some blocks of wood. | Talk about artistic imagination. This bird is made entirely out of silverware, mostly knives. There were other sculptures utilizing a more balanced assortment of knives, forks and spoons. | |
This market featured a swing band. The trio, consisting of a clarinet, upright bass player, and guitarist put out a surprisingly full sound. The guitarist accessed an infinite library of jazz chords that flowed through his fingers. The bass player expertly anchored the whole operation with wonderful tone and technique. The lilting clarinetist wove licks all through this jazz fabric. The icing on the cake was the bass player’s voice. His gravel Louis Armstrong voice was mesmerizing. | |
And don’t forget the food trucks. | |
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About 1/4 mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway, we stopped off to hike the Blue Ridge Tunnel Trail. When I saw this trail in my Virginia Gazetteer, I mistook the trail for a rails-to-trails bike trail. When we pulled into the trailhead, I quickly saw my mistake and didn’t unload the bikes.
The two mile trail, four miles roundtrip, consists of a very steep one-mile walk down to an abandoned one-mile long RR tunnel. The tunnel was carved out during the 1850s. It is much like the nearly one-mile long RR tunnel back in southern Wisconsin, on the Sparta-Elroy Bike Trail. The return walk meant grunting our way back up the steep trail.
On one plaque, a list of the construction workers that died during construction was posted. Cause of death was often listed as “blown up”.
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The trail to the tunnel is paved some of the way, and this photo doesn’t show the steep grade. However, most of the trail is very steep. | On this end of the tunnel, the entrance has a nice brick and stone construction. | |
On the other end of the tunnel, I guess they just got lazy and left the jagged rocks. | |
There is light at the end of the tunnel - it’s just nearly a mile away. | Most of the tunnel was surprisingly dry. Only the very end of the Eastern opening was wet. In Wisconsin, the Sparta-Elroy bike trail has several long tunnels, and they are very wet all the way through. | |
The return trip down the Blue Ridge Parkway made us giddy. The yellow afternoon sun filtered through the fall canopy of trees along the twisting road. We either slowed down or stopped at every lookout. Last year we experienced the eastern portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Tennessee. With this section and the attached Skyline Drive, I think we have driven on a quarter of the road. I can assure you that every inch of the road is spectacular. | |
Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum. | | | | |
