This is a retrospective blog of my seven-week exploration of Virginia along with a journey through the Shenandoah National Park and on down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Cherokee, North Carolina. 'Retrospective' means simply that it wasn't written during the trip, but is being written in hindsight a little over a year later. Baaswell Sheep accompanied me and is writing the blog in the way he's done my later blogs, since he's so good with the color commentary. Unfortunately, since I didn't plan for this blog back them, my pictures are limited to the major attractions, but I'll try to make those galleries a little bigger than I do in my later blogs.
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Today was the first of our go-with-the-flow days, so to speak. Our original intent had been to head up to Lexington for a few days before going on up to Staunton, but the room rates in Lexington were overly high, so my companion looked for other options and happened across a nice looking bed-and-breakfast in Appomattox, which is of course a rather historically important town, so we decided to go for it. But, first, we had to get there.
We checked out of our quaint little room in this one-room bed-and-breakfast in an 1800s house along the main road that runs north out of Bedford up to the Blue Ridge Parkway. The room is vividly decorated in 1800s period decor, creating quite an atmosphere. You don't have access to any other part of the house – just your bedroom and bathroom – but you have use of the front porch and the porch swing, which offers a nice view of the large front yard.
A lot of people know that Thomas Jefferson's was our third president, and many know that his famous home was called Monticello. Some probably also know that Monticello is located just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Few, however, likely know that he had a vacation home further south near Lynchburg, which was a smaller scale version of Monticello on a property called Poplar Forest. Of course, things like that get lost to time when the property changes hands and remains in private ownership for an extended period of time. Fortunately for Poplar Forest, it was bought by a preservation group in 1984, and while it took a few decades to raise the money for complete restoration, it finally opened to the public a few years ago. We stopped by and got a guided tour, enjoying the lack of the crowds found at more famous sites like Monticello. Afterward, we got a fast casual lunch at a Cava while my companion got caught up on his remote work, and then we ventured into downtown Lynchburg.
If you're a drinker, then when you hear 'Lynchburg' you think of Lynchburg, Tennessee, home of the Jack Daniel's distillery. If you're a Virginian, though, you think of Lynchburg, Virginia, a moderate sized city on the banks of the James River about an hour southwest of Charlottesville that dates back to before the Declaration of Independence. That all sounds impressive, but sadly the downtown of Lynchburg seemed largely dead: lots of empty buildings that give testament to a once thriving business district that is no longer all very thriving. The upside is that you get lots of glimpses into the old days and the wonderful architectural designs when you look at some of the empty buildings, but it's still sad. After walking the streets for half an hour we went on over to the river for a pick-me-up taste of the natural world.
Take Fifth Street across the James River and make a quick right turn to get down to Rocky Hill Road and the Riveredge Park, where you can walk alongside the mighty James for about 3/4 of a mile. We walked down and back and enjoyed taking in the views and even watching people working on small boats that were to be entered in an annual contest in the fall. I've lost track of the name of the boat, but it's a type that was used on the river in the 1700s. While we didn't have time to keep exploring, there is another area on the southwest side of the river where you can access the James River Heritage Trail, which crosses an old railroad bridge to an island nearly two miles long in the middle of the river. At the southeast end, you can cross a second railroad bridge to the northeastern side of the river. Would have been fun, but we needed to hit the road to get over to Appomattox. The boat in the last picture is a recreation of the "???" boats that used to run up and down the river carrying freight. They were specially designed with flat bottoms because the river isn't very deep along here. There's actually a modern yearly event were people build and race these boats on the James near Lynchburg.
Our accommodations for tonight and tomorrow night are at a bed-and-breakfast in another old Victorian style house. My companion and I both enjoy these chances to see what houses of yesteryear were like. He's not so crazy about getting up early for breakfast, but at least here they offered three different times for breakfast, so he happily took the latest one. Once we got settled in, we ran off to another Subway for a quick dinner before enjoying the mild night air on the front porch, resting up for a big day tomorrow.
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