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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]