holidays

We dropped the rental car off, got a shuttle to the airport and then a $3.10 bus downtown. The bus drove past the Pentagon, and Arlington cemetery. We walked to the Mall and had a look in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, which was good but busy. We walked up the Mall through the butterfly and sculpture gardens to the Smithsonian Art Museum, where they had many good pictures: David’s Napoleon, lots of Whistler and Winslow Homer, some Turner, Constable, Ingres and Impressionists. There was an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘beat’ photographs, taken for the ’50’s to the ’90’s, including photos of William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

We had a very good lunch in the French cafe on the ground floor of the Art Museum, and then walked up the Mall to the Capitol. It started raining, and there was a thunderstorm. We walked from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Department of Justice to the White House. There were a few tourists outside the White House, and there was some sort of event going on near the Treasury where a crowd had gathered, but apart from that it was fairly quiet.
We got the bus back, and had dinner in the hotel.

We got breakfast in a store in Floyd, and then began the drive to Washington. We stopped at the quiet town of Lexington for lunch. We had a look at the grand buildings of the Washington and Lee University, and saw the grave of General Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler. By the chapel at the university was Robert E. Lee’s office, preserved exactly as he left it when he was last there in 1870, apparently, shortly before he died. There was round table in the middle of the room with some old-looking documents on it.

We had a look round Lexington, a nice old red-brick town, failing to find General Stonewall Jackson’s house, and then drove on up the Shenandoah valley to our hotel near the airport at Dulles.

Breakfast of grits and cheese and bacon at the Blue Ridge Restaurant round the corner form the Hotel Floyd was followed by a drive through a picturesque countryside of wooded hills and meadows and creeks and neat homesteads and eventually up a dirt track to a small parking lot on Buffalo Mountain. We walked up a steep trail to the summit. Timber rattlesnakes, bears, and a kind of mealy bug found nowhere else on earth were apparently present, but we didn’t see any of them. We did get spectacular views when we arrived, sweating and breathless, at the top.

We had to drive fast round the winding roads to make it to the Chateau Morisette winery in time for lunch – we got there only just before 2pm. Lunch and local wine were good, and worth the haste.

We checked into a motel a mile down the road from Floyd, and in the evening we went into Floyd for the Friday night music. We got there about 5.30, and there were musicians gathering, and a banjo player was warming up near the public restrooms. Another good dinner at Oddfellas, and then we went to the Country Store for the Jamboree. $4 got us entry.

They’d moved all the shop displays and set out rows of chairs facing a dance floor and the stage at the back of the store. At 6:30 we listened to Janet Turner and Friends do an hour of gospel songs, then two bluegrass bands – County Connections and the Hans Creek Band – played for dancing until the store closed, around 10:30. The place was packed, and as soon as the first dance band struck up the floor was full of dancers doing various forms of flat-footing with and without tap shoes. A few square dances were called. We joined in.
Outside in the street various sessions were gong on, people sheltering from the rain showers under cover by the music shop. If it hadn’t have been raining there would have been more outside – there were chairs set out, and even brick-built alcoves along main street set up specially for musicians

We drove to Floyd, Virginia, following the Blue Ridge Parkway for some of the way. We stopped at Mabry Mill, an old working grist mill, and had a look around the old restored buildings there.

We had a picnic lunch parked at an overlook and watched hawks flying above the trees below us.
We arrived in Floyd and checked into the Hotel Floyd. We hadn’t booked in advance, and they only had a room for tonight – but helpfully phoned a hotel 1 mile up the road, and let us speak to them to book tomorrow night there. Weekends are busy in Floyd, it seems.
On Thursday nights the Hotel Floyd has a free concert, 5-8pm, on its outdoor stage, which is right outside our room.
We explored the small town of Floyd, population 432. The town is a centre for music in the area. The Floyd Country Store hosts a Jamboree every Friday night – they move the shop displays aside to make room for the audience and dancing. We had a look in a music shop which had some very nice guitars hand made by local luthiers. There were flyers for local concerts in all the shops. A bookshop we went into also sold guitar and banjo strings. The town seems to have music coming out of every pore.

Back at the hotel we watched the concert for an hour (the band were called ‘No Strings Attached’), then walked down the street to Oddfellas Cantina for dinner. The food was excellent. There was a stage and a singer-songwriter called Joy entertained us during the meal. We talked to her afterwards, and she said Friday nights here were good, with a jam session in the Cantina, plus the Jamboree at the Country Store, and musicians playing in sessions out in the street.

After breakfast was delivered to the cabin we went over to the Blue Ridge Music Center, about a mile away. Run by the National Parks Service, the center has an outdoor amphitheater where bands play at weekends and a shop and visitor center selling local music and books. Every weekday they have local musicians playing outside the visitor center. We stayed for an hour to watch Bill and Maggie Anderson perform.

We ate a packed lunch, and then walked a circular trail from the visitor center. The trail climbed steeply at first through thick mixed woodland up Fisher’s Peak. We saw a small turtle by the side of the path. Later the trail dropped through meadows and crossed a few creeks in a marshy area. We got caught in the usual afternoon mountain rain-shower just before we got back to the car. We bought some CDs in the shop, and a DVD about mountain song collecting, and went back to the cabin, where we cooked steak for dinner, went in the hot tub and watched the DVD.

We went out for breakfast, bought stamps, then checked out of the hotel and set off for Galax (pr ‘Gay-lax’), Virginia. We drove most of the way along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic road built in the 1930s under Roosevelt’s administration. The road runs high up in the mountains, with frequent pull-ins called ‘overlooks’ where you can stop to admire the view. At times the road is on top of a ridge and there are overlooks on both sides, each offering vast views over the rolling mountains falling away below to the east and west.

We stopped to buy sandwiches for lunch at Blowing Rock, and further on parked and walked down a trail to look at a waterfall. At one point we had to stop and wait half an hour while workmen felled trees up ahead. There was so little traffic on the road that in half an hour only three cars pulled up behind us. Getting closer to Galax, the road dropped down and snaked through meadows and alongside creeks. We saw three wild turkeys, and some deer.
We arrived at the Fiddlers’ Roost cabins on Fisher’s Peak Road at around 6pm after a drive up a dirt track through the woods. We were directed to cabin 5- a one-bedroom cabin with a raised porch and a hot-tub looking out into the woods. Andy, one of the owners, cautioned us about bears.

We drove into Galax, ‘world capitol of old-time music’, and ate a good dinner off polystyrene plates at the Galax smokehouse. Then we went to the Stringbean Coffeehouse for the Tuesday night jam session. We sat on a small stage with three local musicians and played with them for about an hour to an audience of groups playing cards and drinking coffee.

Back at the cabin we sat on the porch and listened to a whippoorwill calling out in the trees, and watched the moths and fireflies.
Click the link to hear the whippoorwhill: 0623_003148.mp3

A lazy day. We drove to the visitor center and got tickets for a trolley bus tour, and then walked downtown. We had brunch at a cafe, and got talking to some locals, one of whom turned out to be a banjo player. Asheville has a lot of art shops and galleries and vegetarian restaurants, but fortunately also lots of bookshops, microbreweries and good pubs. We had a look round the town, and got on the bus tour, which eventually took us back to the visitor center. We bought a map and a book and some CDs of local musicians, and then checked into the hotel.

In the evening we had dinner at the Lobster Trap – R had good oysters, and a whole lobster.

We drove through the mountains to the Cataloochee Valley. The last 20 miles was on hairy mountain roads, with sheer drops and hairpin bends, and a lot of the way no tarmac, just mud and gravel. The valley has meadows and forested mountain sides and the remains of some old buildings in various states of disrepair. We parked near a trailhead and saw some wild turkeys in the distance. We picked up a trail map from a wooden box, and walked up a steep trail through the woods. There were lots of butterflies. We realised we weren’t going to manage the whole 6-mile loop without lunch, so turned back and ate our picnic in the car.

After lunch we followed a trail along the side of a stream for a couple of miles. On the way back there was a heavy thunder storm. Back in the car, we drove a circuit back round to the park entrance and had good views of elk and more turkeys. The elk were re-introduced to the valley on 2001 – some have tags and collars fitted.

In the evening we drove to Asheville and had a good dinner at the Biergarden, and then walked around downtown. It seems like a nice place, so we decided to stay another day, and booked into a more central hotel downtown.

We had breakfast in the Goose Feathers cafe a block from the hotel after a fruitless search for postage stamps, and then checked out and took a cab to the car rental place at the airport. The cab driver, hearing that we were travelling north-east, recommended a stop at Williamsburg. The Queen of England had visited and liked it so much there that he thought she was going to move over permanently. She didn’t like George Bush jnr, but likes David Cameron. Many other pearls of wisdom were dispensed on the journey.

It took 5.5 hours to drive to Asheville. When we hit Calhoun County, South Carolina, we encountered our first hill since leaving England. Plenty more followed as we got into the Piedmont. Approaching Asheville the roads cut through the forested Smokey Mountains. Sure enough, a smoky blue haze was hanging over them. We’re staying at the Country Inn, a kind of slightly up-market motel on the outskirts of Asheville.

We went up the road to the Fiddlin’ Pig Bluegrass BBQ for dinner. A good four-piece bluegrass band came on at 6:30pm. A dance group did some display dancing, and then came to get audience members to join in – we did one with them.

We had an early lunch at Vic’s on the River – very nice Oysters Rockefeller, and then got on a dolphin watching boat. The boat traveled out through the inshore islands as far as the Georgia Sea Islands, which were a refuge for escaped slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries, and where a largely independent population descended from slaves still lives. They speak a dialect called Gullah. We saw dolphins and lots of pelicans.
In the evening we had dinner at The Olde Pink House, an old mansion house now a restaurant. We had raspberry martinis and champagne.
After dinner we walked down to Forsyth Park in time to see G-Love and Special Sauce play at the SCAD Alumni free concert.